Encyclopedia of Russian History

E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F RUSSIAN HISTORY EDITOR IN CHIEF James R. Millar George Washington University SENIOR ASS...

Author: James R. Millar

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E N C Y C L O P E D I A

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RUSSIAN HISTORY

EDITOR IN CHIEF

James R. Millar George Washington University SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR

ED ITO RI A L BOA RD

Ann E. Robertson George Washington University ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Daniel H. Kaiser Grinnell College Louise McReynolds University of Hawaii Donald J. Raleigh University of North Carolina Nicholas V. Riasanovsky University of California, Berkeley Ronald Grigor Suny University of Chicago ADVISORY BOARD

Marianna Tax Choldin University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Gregory L. Freeze Brandeis University Paul R. Gregory University of Houston Lindsey Hughes University College London Paul R. Josephson Colby College Janet L. B. Martin University of Miami Bruce W. Menning U.S. Army Command and Staff College Boris N. Mironov Russian Academy of Science Reginald E. Zelnik University of California, Berkeley


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RUSSIAN HISTORY VOLUME 4: S-Z, INDEX JAMES R. MILLAR, EDITOR IN CHIEF

Encyclopedia of Russian History James R. Millar

© 2004 by Macmillan Reference USA. Macmillan Reference USA is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Macmillan Reference USA™ and Thomson Learning™ are trademarks used herein under license. For more information, contact Macmillan Reference USA 300 Park Avenue South, 9th Floor New York, NY 10010 Or you can visit our Internet site at http://www.gale.com

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution, or information storage retrieval systems—without the written permission of the publisher. For permission to use material from this product, submit your request via Web at http://www.gale-edit.com/permissions, or you may download our Permissions Request form and submit your request by fax or mail to:

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Encyclopedia of Russian history / James R. Millar, editor in chief. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-02-865693-8 (set hardcover) — ISBN 0-02-865694-6 (v. 1) — ISBN 0-02-865695-4 (v. 2) — ISBN 0-02-865696-2 (v. 3) — ISBN 0-02-865697-0 (v. 4) 1. Russia—History—Encyclopedias. 2. Soviet Union—History—Encyclopedias. 3. Russia (Federation)—History—Encyclopedias. I. Millar, James R., 1936DK14.E53 2003 947’.003—dc21

2003014389

This title is also available as an e-book. ISBN 0-02-865907-4 (set) Contact your Gale sales representative for ordering information. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

POWER, POLITICS, & T E C H N O LO G Y

A makeshift memorial stands before the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, 1992, six years after the accident. Ironically, the testing of security equipment triggered a malfunction, blowing the roof off the reactor, and causing the worst nuclear disaster in history. © GROCHOWIAK EWA/CORBIS

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Below: The Chernobyl nuclear plant, 1986, six months after the accident. An estimated 3.5 million people continue to live in the 100,000-square-mile contaminated zone. © AFP/CORBIS

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Top: A serviceman passes by an opened SS-18 intercontinental ballistic multiplewarhead Satan missile silo in the town of Kartaly in Russian’s Chelyabinsky region, August 16, 2002. Western intelligence experts fear lax security at Russia’s 15,000 non-strategic tactical nuclear weapons sites present a greater danger than an accidental launch. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS Middle: The Kursk nuclear submarine in its mooring in the base of Vidyayevo. The Kursk sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000, killing all 118 aboard. © AFP/CORBIS Bottom: Deactivation of nuclear missiles in Surovatikha, Russia, January, 1995. Following the collapse of the USSR, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine surrendered all the Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on their soil to Moscow. © EPIX/ CORBIS


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Top: Soviet troops parade through Palace Square, Leningrad, under the watchful gaze of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. The square was the starting point for both the Revolution of 1905 (Bloody Sunday) and the October Revolution in 1917. © ELIO CIOL/CORBIS

Bottom: A unit of Soviet soldiers march in Red Square on the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Moscow, 1987. © PETER TURNLEY/CORBIS

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Top left: The Russian Flag. Peter the Great returned from the Netherlands with plans for a Russian navy and introduced a tricolor flag inspired by the Dutch flag. Originally adopted as the national flag in 1799, the tricolor returned in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. © ROYALTY-FREE/CORBIS Below: Demonstrators take to the streets of Moscow to defend democracy during the anti-Gorbachev coup, August 1991. Key Soviet leaders, including the vice president, feared Gorbachev’s policy of democratization would mean the end of the Soviet Union, and their own power, and placed him under house arrest. The coup was thwarted by its planners’ incompetence, popular resistance, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who banned the Communist Party from all Russian territory. © DAVID TURNLEY/CORBIS


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Top: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev stands at the podium with U.S. President Ronald Reagan at a White House summit, December 7, 1987. The two leaders ushered in the end of the Cold War, which had seen the two nations at odds since the ending of World War II. © PETER TURNLEY/CORBIS Middle: U.S. President Bill Clinton (right) laughing with Russian President Boris Yeltsin during a press conference after their meeting at Hyde Park, October 23, 1995. © AFP/CORBIS

Bottom: Russian President Vladimir Putin after adjusting the ribbon on a wreath placed outside the mausoleum of late president Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, March 2, 2001. The Soviet Union had backed Vietnam (Indochine) in its struggle for independence from France, and during the war against the United States. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS

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Top left: Two Chechen rebels, armed with a heavy machine gun, rest from patrolling the city. They are fighting Russian troops for their independence. © PETER TURNLEY/CORBIS Below: A woman cries after another woman is badly injured by a Russian shell in Grozny, Chechnya. © PETER TURNLEY/CORBIS


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Top right: A Proton rocket carrying the Zvezda (meaning "star" in Russian) service module is being prepared at the launch pad at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, July 8, 2000. Zvezda, an integral part of the International Space Station, is responsible for the crew living quarters, life support systems, electrical power distribution, data processing systems, flight control systems, and propulsion system. © AFP/CORBIS Below: The Russian Space Station MIR (meaning both “peace” and “world” in Russian) photographed from the cargo bay of the U.S. Space Shuttle Atlantis. The first module of MIR was launched February 20, 1986. After far exceeding its expected service life, the station was destroyed through controlled re-entry over the Pacific Ocean on March 23, 2001. CORBIS

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SAINTS In addition to the saints inherited from the Early Church and Byzantium, the Orthodox Church in Rus soon began to create its own objects of veneration. The saints belonged to three main categories: (1) spiritual and secular leaders who rendered significant service to the Church; (2) martyrs; and (3) those who exhibited extraordinary spiritual gifts, specifically the power to perform miracles, especially through their relics. Although the miracles were not a formal precondition under canon law, popular Orthodoxy placed a high value on this quality, primarily if manifested in “uncorrupted remains” (netlennye moshchi). The miracle of physical preservation, attested by an official examination of the crypt, reinforced belief in the power to perform miracles and hence intercede on behalf of the disabled and distressed. Canonizations in the Russian Orthodox Church have proceeded in a highly uneven fashion. In early medieval Russia (from Christianization in 988 to the 1547 Church Council), the Russian Church canonized only nineteen figures; the first to be so honored were the princes Boris and Gleb, whose nonresistance to a violent death amidst the fratricidal warfare made them the very model of kenoticism. The first major burst of canonizations came during the Church Councils of 1547 and 1549, which, reflecting Muscovy’s new self-assertion as the Third Rome, recognized thirty-nine new saints. Subsequently the church slowly expanded the number of saints, but that process came to a virtual halt in 1721: It canonized only five new saints before Nicholas II ascended the throne in 1894 and sought to bolster autocracy by favoring canonization and emphasizing the religious foundations of autocracy. The Bolshevik Revolution brought all of that to an end; the new regime actively engaged in de-canonization, opening scores of saints’ crypts (to demonstrate that the “uncorrupted relics” were frauds) and consigning relics to museums and storage. Although the Church was able to canonize five saints in the 1960s and 1970s, an era of large-scale canonizations opened in 1988. Over the next decade the church canonized a long list of prominent medieval figures (i.e., Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy and the icon-painter Andrei Rublev) as well as many martyred during the Soviet era.

S

By 1999 the Russian Orthodox Church had a total of 1,362 saints. The majority came from the hierarchy (11.5%) and monastic orders (49.9%); few of the parish clergy were canonized (1.8%), all,

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indeed, on the basis of marytyrdom. In addition to a substantial number of princes and tsars (6.9%), the church canonized ordinary lay martyrs (24.5%), some “fools-in-Christ” (3.2%), and laypersons venerated for their extraordinary spirituality (2.3%). These saints are, moreover, overwhelmingly male (96.4%). Since 1999, the church has begun to change these proportions, chiefly because of the ongoing canonization of martyrs (e.g., more than a thousand in August 2000). While some decisions have been exceedingly controversial (above all, the canonization of Nicholas II and his family), the church seeks to pay homage to the ordinary priests and parishioners who paid the ultimate price for their unswerving faith during the merciless repressions of the first decades of Soviet rule.

See also: HAGIOGRAPHY; ORTHODOXY; RELIGION; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

ing stranger. The Russians arriving in the seventeenth century adopted the Evenk word for the local population. The capitol of the Republic of Sakha is Yakutsk, its largest city. Russians sent to gather fur and other riches for the tsar, made Yakutia a stopping point on their way to the Pacific Ocean during the eighteenth century. They brought new agricultural techniques to the Sakha, who were primarily cattle and horse breeders, but the local population paid a price in fur tax for these innovations. In 1923 Soviet power was established in Yakutsk. It was declared an autonomous republic under the name of Yakutia, but was still economically and politically controlled by the Soviet Union. It received its official name (Republic of Sakha) when the Declaration of Sovereignty of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) was signed on September 27, 1990. The Republic of Sakha has a president, elected for a term of five years.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freeze, Gregory. (1996). “Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia.” Journal of Modern History 68:308–50. Grunwald, Constantin de. (1960). Saints of Russia. London: Hutchinson. GREGORY L. FREEZE

SAKHA AND YAKUTS The famous folklore scholar G. V. Ksenofontov has compared the once nomadic Sakha people to a branch of an apple tree carried around the world by the wind and finally taking root. The Sakha, or Yakut, people are the descendants of Turkic nomads and originated in the region around Lake Baikal in what is now Russia. But in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Mongols arrived from the south, along with other peoples, and the Sakha moved north and east, settling eventually in the basin of the river Lena, later called Yakutia. In the early twenty-first century, Yakutia or the Republic of Sakha is an autonomous republic within Russia in the far northeast, five times the size of France. Known as the “Land of Soft Gold” for the rich furs that come from the region, Yakutia is home to the Sakha people, as well as four other indigenous cultural groups (the Even, the Evenki, the Yukagir, and the Chukchi). The name “Yakut” comes from the Evenk word yako, mean-

A Yakut cook peers out from a restaurant window encased in frozen snow. © DEAN CONGER/CORBIS

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Always a resource-rich region, Yakutia plays a large role in Russia’s economy. The main industry in the republic is mining. The Republic of Sakha produces 99 percent of Russia’s diamonds, 24 percent of its gold, and 33 percent of its silver. It is also a major producer of coal, natural gas, tin, timber, fish, and other natural resources. The diamond mining industry is the main source of Russia’s foreign currency income; the multinational De Beers company partnership with the Russian company Almazy Rossii-Sakha (Diamonds of Russia and Sakha) was established in 1992. The Sakha summer festival, Ysyakh, is held in June, celebrating the ancestors’ movement of their cattle to pasture in the steppe. The festival opens with the solemn ritual of feeding the fire and includes sport contests and horse races, as well as kumys, a traditional beverage made of fermented mare’s milk. Since 1991, the Sakha language has been a mandatory class in primary schools, and some 92 percent of ethnically Sakha people speak their own language. It is not considered to be an endangered language, unlike the Chukchi, Even, or Evenki languages. The some 400,000 Sakha people living and working in the Republic of Sakha take pride in their strong and unique heritage.

See also:

CHUKCHI; EVENKI; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SO-

VIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Argounova, Tatiana. (2000). “Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).” . Hiller, Kristin. (1997). “Big River of Siberia.” Russian Life 9:16–24.

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Andrei Sakharov was born into an intelligentsia family in Moscow in 1921. Following in the footsteps of his physicist father, he enrolled at the physics faculty of Moscow University in 1938. Exempted from military service in World War II, Sakharov graduated in 1942 and spent the war years as an engineer at a munitions factory. There he met and married Klavdia Vikhireva (1919–1969), a laboratory technician. After the war Sakharov undertook graduate work in the laboratory of Igor Tamm. He received his candidate’s degree (roughly equivalent to a Ph.D.) in 1947. In the late 1940s, Sakharov conducted research that led to the explosion of the Soviet hydrogen bomb in 1953. The same year, he was elected a full member of Academy of Sciences. At thirty-two, he was the youngest member in the history of that institution. Sakharov began to support victims of political oppression as early as 1951 when he sheltered a Jewish mathematician fired from the Soviet weapons program. In 1958 he published two papers on the effects of nuclear explosions and appealed for a ban on atmospheric testing. With this work he began to move beyond physics into political activism. The 1968 publication in the New York Times of Sakharov’s essay “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom” marked, he wrote in his memoirs, a “decisive step” in his development as a dissident. The essay called for disarmament and rapprochement with the West. As a result of the essay, Sakharov was banned from all weapons research. His wife died shortly thereafter, and Sakharov returned to Moscow and academic physics.

SAKHAROV, ANDREI DMITRIEVICH

Sakharov became involved in the emerging human rights movement, cofounding the Moscow Human Rights Committee in 1970. Through articles, petitions, interviews, and demonstrations, Sakharov and others in the movement aided political prisoners and advocated the abolition of censorship, an independent judiciary, and the introduction of contested elections. Sakharov married fellow human rights activist Yelena Bonner in 1972. She represented him at the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1975. The Nobel Committee’s citation emphasized Sakharov’s linkage of human rights and international cooperation.

(1921–1989), physicist, political dissident, and member of the Council of People’s Deputies; recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

Sakharov’s denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 led to his exile to Gorky in January 1980. He maintained ties with

Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vitebsky, P. (1990). “Yakut.” In The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union, ed. Graham Smith. London: Longman. ERIN K. CROUCH


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Lourie, Richard. (2002). Sakharov: A Biography. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Sakharov, Andrei. (1989). Moscow and Beyond, 1986 to 1989, tr. Antonina Bouis. New York: Vintage Books. Sakharov, Andrei. (1990). Memoirs, tr. Richard Lourie. New York: Knopf. LISA A. KIRSCHENBAUM

SALT See

STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TREATIES.

SALTYKOV-SHCHEDRIN LIBRARY See NATIONAL LIBRARY OF RUSSIA.

SALTYKOV-SHCHEDRIN, MIKHAIL YEVGRAFOVICH (1826–1889), one of Russia’s greatest satirists.

Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS. REPRODUCED

BY PERMISSION.

Moscow and the West via Bonner until her exile in 1984. In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev invited Sakharov to return to Moscow. Sakharov immediately became an important and ubiquitous figure in the democratization movement. He was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989. He participated in drafting a new constitution. He lent his personal support to numerous causes, advocating amnesty for political prisoners, disarmament, peaceful solutions to ethnic conflicts, and limits on Gorbachev’s emergency powers. On the eve of his death in December 1989, he was working to abolish Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which enshrined the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. The article was abolished in March 1990.

See also:

BONNER, YELENA GEORGIEVNA; CONGRESS OF

PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES; DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GLASNOST; HUMAN RIGHTS

Writing for leading radical journals of his time, Sovremennik (The Contemporary) (1862–1865) and Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) (1868–1889), Saltykov (pen name Shchedrin) created the most biting satires in Russian literature. Among his best-known books are Istoriia odnogo goroda (History of a Town) (1869–1870) and Gospoda Golovlevy (The Golovlyov Family) (1875— 1880). History is an account of despotic mayors’ rule of a fictitious town Glupov (Foolsville). The mayors can be distinguished from each other only by the degree of their incompetence and ill will. The book is a satire on the whole institution of Russian statehood and the very spirit that pervades the Russian way of life: routine mismanagement, needless oppression, and pointless tyranny. At the same time, it is an attack on the Russian people for their passivity toward their own fate, for their acceptance of violence and oppression of their rulers. The Golovlyov Family is a study of the institution of the family as cornerstone of society. In this novel, Saltykov describes moral and physical decline of three generations of a Russian gentry family. The nickname of the novel’s protagonist, Iudushka (“Little Judas”), whose treacherous behavior toward his nearest family is a matter of daily business, became part of Russian speech.

Bonner, Elena. (1986). Alone Together, tr. Alexander Cook. New York: Knopf.

Among Saltykov’s other better-known works are Pompadur i pompadurshi (Pompadours and Pompadouresses) (1863–1874), Sovremennaia idilliia

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(Contemporary Idyll) (1877–1883), and Skazki (Fairy Tales) (1869–1886).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

all Sami publications destroyed. Ten years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sami became again an optional subject in Lujaur schools, and some basic texts were published. A Kola Sami association was formed in 1989 and later joined the worldwide Sami Council.

Draitser, Emil. (1994). Techniques of Satire: The Case of Saltykov-Shchedrin. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

See also: FINNS AND KARELIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES,

See also:

INTELLIGENTSIA; JOURNALISM

Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. E. (1977). The Golovlyov Family. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. E. (1984). The Pompadours. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. EMIL DRAITSER

PEOPLES BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beach, Hugh. (1994). “The Sami of Lapland.” In Polar Peoples: Self-Determination and Development, ed. Minority Rights Group. London: Minority Rights Publications. Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

SAMI The fifty- to eighty thousand Sami (Lapps) live mostly in northern Norway and Sweden, some in Finland, and only about 3 percent (1,600) in the Kola peninsula of the Russian Federation. They represent less than 0.2 percent of the Murmansk oblast population. They reached the Gulf of Bothnia around 1300. Sami and Finnic languages are not mutually intelligible, having split some three thousand years ago. Three to ten Sami languages are distinguished, and the standard literary Sami in the Nordic countries is difficult to understand for the Kola (Kild) Sami, who are also unfamiliar with its Latin script. The reputed Asian features are actually encountered in only 25 percent of the Sami population. Inhabiting most of present Finland and Karelia one thousand years ago, the Sami were pushed toward the Arctic Ocean by Scandinavian, Finnish, Russian, and Karelian booty seekers. Those in the west were forced to adopt Catholicism and later Lutheranism. Greek Orthodoxy was imposed on the Kola Samis in the early 1500s, after they were subjected by Novgorod around 1300. The first western Sami book was printed in 1619, and the Bible in 1811, while the first Kola Sami book appeared in 1878. Reindeer herding remains a major occupation. The Soviet Russian authorities annihilated the traditional Kola Sami settlements in the 1930s, relocating them repeatedly to ever larger state or collective farms, where overgrazing severely reduced the number of reindeer. By now Lujaur (Lovozero in Russian) in central Kola remains the only partly Sami district. In 1937 Moscow ordered


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Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst. REIN TAAGEPERA

SAMIZDAT The term samizdat is most often translated as “selfpublishing.” It refers to the clandestine practice in the Soviet Union of circulating manuscripts that were banned, had no chance of being published in normal channels, or were politically suspect. These were generally typescripts, mimeograph copies, or handwritten items. The practice got its primary impetus in the mid to late 1950s, a period that in a socio-literary context is often referred to as The Thaw. This itself is linked to Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign of deStalinization, which provided an opening for literary themes previously disallowed. The opening was frequently arbitrary as the case of Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago proved in 1958. The novel could not be published in the Soviet Union, and Pasternak was brutally vilified despite being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The fact that broad categories of literature and sociopolitical themes still could not be addressed moved much of this output underground into samizdat. Sometimes this mode of literary output was systematic as with later journals and chronicles. But much of this was done spontaneously on an individual basis. Of key importance is that samizdat is inextricably linked to what came to be the dissident movements in the Soviet Union.

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These, in turn, were linked with other groups seeking, in early manifestations, protection of human rights, greater religious freedom, and more ethnic autonomy. As Scammell notes (1984, p. 507), samizdat “had come into existence in the late fifties as a result of the clash between the intellectuals’ post-Stalinist hunger for more freedom of expression and the continuing repressiveness of the censorship.” Freedom of expression was one thing, but it was deadly to the state’s perception of what could be allowed when the political admixture was included. The fact that samizdat and dissent were coeval is impossible to avoid and had great consequences for Soviet history. From the early 1960s to the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, samizdat had an uneven history. There were periods of extreme repression, for instance in 1972–1973. But samizdat was not quelled. Very often, trials were benchmarks in the advancement of samizdat and its many causes. The February 1966 trial of two writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who had been publishing abroad for several years using pseudonyms, was a sensation since they were given seven and five years respectively at hard labor for allegedly writing anti-Soviet material. Their arrest led to public protests by dissidents. A number of them were then arrested, and this, in turn, led to further protests and corresponding arrests. Books and pamphlets with documents from these trials were frequently compiled and circulated widely in secret. These added much fuel to the fire, and a constant cycle was created. The Soviet government was also severely criticized worldwide because of a new policy of punishing dissident writers by confining them to mental hospitals.

and sporadically thereafter. Other notable publications included the Ukrainian Herad, the Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania, and historian Roy Medvedev’s Political Diary (which ran from 1964 to 1971). This is by no means to minimize the huge number of individual contributions. Together they undercut the power and prestige of the Soviet state.

See also: CENSORSHIP; DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GOSIZDAT; JOURNALISM; SINYAVSKY-DANIEL TRIAL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bukovsky, Vladimir. (1978). To Build a Castle. London: Deutsch; New York: Viking. Meerson-Aksenov, Michael, and Shragin, Boris. (1977). The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’—An Anthology, tr. Nickolas Lupinin. Belmont, MA: Nordland. Reddaway, Peter, ed. and tr. (1972). Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union. New York: American Heritage. Scammell, Michael. (1984). Solzhenitsyn: A Biography. New York: Norton. NICKOLAS LUPININ

SAMOILOVA, KONDORDIYA NIKOLAYEVNA (1876–1920), Bolshevik; leader of Communist Party Women’s Department. Konkordiya Samoilova was one of the founders of the Soviet Communist Party’s programs for emancipating women. Born into a priestly family in Irkutsk, she studied in the Bestuzhevsky Courses for Women in St. Petersburg in the 1890s. In 1901 Samoilova became a full-time member of the Social-Democratic Labor Party.

Samizdat and dissent grew despite all impediments. It was a cultural opposition, an independent subculture, as Meerson-Aksenov (1977) called it, and it signified that social and political judgments stemming from sources other than the state were seen to be critically significant. In reality, the Soviet state was stymied by this phenomenon because it no longer knew quite how to handle it. The blanket executions of the 1930s were out of the question. The breadth of the criticism was also sometimes incomprehensible to the government. It could include everything from opposing the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the latest broadsides against modern art.

Samoilova spent sixteen years in the revolutionary underground, mostly in St. Petersburg. An editor of Pravda (Truth) in 1913, she created a column on the female proletariat and, in 1914, with Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaia, and Lyudmila Stal, founded Rabotnitsa (Female Worker), a newspaper devoted to working-class women. In 1913 she also organized the first celebration in Russia of International Woman’s Day.

The most famous of the systematic publications was The Chronicle of Current Events, which was issued without interruption from 1968 to 1972

In 1917 Samoilova revived Rabotnitsa, which had been closed by the tsarist government. In 1918 she worked closely with Inessa Armand and Alexan-

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dra Kollontai to establish a women’s department (the Zhenotdel) within the Communist Party. While Armand and Kollontai developed the program for women’s emancipation, Samoilova concentrated on building the department from the ground up. Always an enthusiastic supporter of Vladimir Lenin and a reliable, hard-working, efficient Bolshevik, Samoilova was trusted by the party leadership, despite the fact that she was as ardent an advocate for work among women as the more flamboyant Kollontai. She was also an able propagandist who crafted vivid, accessible speeches and pamphlets. Samoilova died of cholera on a propaganda trip down the Volga in 1920.

See also:

FEMINISM; KOLLONTAI, ALEXANDRA MIKHAIL-

OVNA; ZHENOTDEL

Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Elizabeth A. (1997). The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. BARBARA EVANS CLEMENTS

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tion strategies to improve their operations and performance. Enterprise performance was to be gauged relative to long-run plans and norms. A system of state orders (goszakazy) was to replace compulsory output targets, although the distinction between state orders and plan targets was never clarified. Enterprises were granted the right to exchange goods, with contracts negotiated between firms to include output, delivery, and price components agreed upon by both firms. Enterprises were also allowed to retain a greater share of their planned profits to distribute as bonuses or to invest in additional capital. Samoupravlenie was an attempt to make Soviet managers responsible for the final results; that is, producing the quantity and quality of output desired by customers, whether firms or individual consumers.

See also:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

S T E F A N O ,

PERESTROIKA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aganbegyan, Abel. (1988). The Economic Challenge of Perestroika. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gregory, Paul R. (1990). Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. SUSAN J. LINZ

SAMOUPRAVLENIE

SAN STEFANO, TREATY OF

Samoupravlenie, or self-management, was introduced during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika as a mechanism to induce enterprises to produce quality products desired by customers and as a way of extending democratization to the workplace. Soviet enterprises were placed on full economic accounting (polny khozraschet), which meant that current operations had to be self-financed from sales revenues rather than subsidized by central or ministerial authorities, and any change or expansion in operations had to be financed from retained earnings. Managers were to be elected by the employees and to work directly with a council selected from among the workers. The objective of samoupravlenie was to reduce “petty tutelage,” the phrase for interference in day-to-day enterprise operations by planning or other administrative officials. Samoupravlenie was part of a larger effort to promote initiative and responsibility in Soviet enterprises. For example, the number of compulsory plan targets given to enterprises was reduced, providing more flexibility for them to select produc-


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The Treaty of San Stefano, signed March 3, 1878, ended the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878). On January 31, 1878, with Russian victory over Turkey a foregone conclusion, the belligerents agreed to an armistice at Adrianople, followed by peace negotiations at San Stefano, a village near Constantinople. There, Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev, former ambassador to the Porte, and Savfet Pasha worked out final terms for signature on March 3, the anniversary date of Tsar Alexander II’s imperial accession. Accordingly, Turkey agreed to pay reparations of 1.41 billion rubles, of which 1.1 billion would be cancelled by cession to Russia in Asia Minor of Ardahan, Kars, Batumi, and Bayazid. In the Balkans, Turkey ceded northern Dobrudja and the Danube delta to Russia for ultimate transfer to Romania, in return for Romanian agreement to Russian occupation of southern Bessarabia. With a seaboard on the Mediterranean and an elected prince, Bulgaria remained under nominal Turkish control,

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while Bosnia and Herzegovina received autonomy. Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro received their independence, along with territorial enlargement. Turkey was obliged strictly to observe concessions for local participation in government that were inherent in the Organic Regulation of 1868 on Crete, while analogous regimes were to be implemented in Thessaly and Albania. The Porte was also to introduce reforms in Turkish Armenia. The San Stefano Treaty formally went into effect on March 16, 1878, but concerted opposition from Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, together with Russia’s growing diplomatic isolation, meant that the agreement remained only preliminary. Indeed, its main provisions subsequently underwent substantial revision at the Congress of Berlin in July 1878.

See also:

BERLIN, CONGRESS OF; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS;

TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jelavich, Barbara. (1974). St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814–1974. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. OLEG R. AIRAPETOV

SARMATIANS Between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C.E., the Sarmatians settled in what is today southern Russia, eventually replacing the Scythians as the dominant tribe in this region. They vanished from the historical record after their land was overrun by the Huns in the late fourth century C.E., and little is known about them. They rose again, however, in the realm of mythology. According to a legend which gained popularity in Poland in the fifteenth century, the ancient Sarmatians rode into the Polish lands and gave order and stability to the primitive local population. This myth helped justify serfdom, allowing the nobles to imagine that they were of a superior racial lineage. The Sarmatian story became enormously popular, leading some to call Copernicus the Sarmatian Ptolemy.

state fought against non-Catholic foes outside the country, the legend mutated to include the idea that the Sarmatians had a mission from God to spread and defend the True Faith. By the end of the seventeenth century, Sarmatianism had developed a xenophobic character, as many Polish nobles turned away from all “foreign” influences to glory in their indigenous Sarmatian heritage. This myth even influenced the style of clothing, art, and architecture of Poland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the nobles came to fancy pseudo-oriental designs that they felt evoked their racial heritage. The intellectuals of the Polish Enlightenment blamed Sarmatianism for the crises of the eighteenth century and for Poland’s eventual destruction and partition. Although some of the stylistic features lived on a bit longer, the broader ideology of Sarmatianism faded away in the nineteenth century or lived on as a trace element within new ideological formations.

See also:

HUNS; POLAND; SCYTHIANS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bogucka, Maria. (1996). The Lost World of the “Sarmatians”: Custom as the Regulator of Polish Social Life in Early Modern Times. Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences. Grabowska, Bozena. (1993). “Portraits after Life: The Baroque Legacy of Poland’s Nobles.” History Today 43:18. BRIAN PORTER

SARTS Former term for Turkic-speaking Muslim residents of cities along the Syr Darya River, the Ferghana Valley, and Samarkand.

Sarmatianism did not have any specific religious content at first, but during the CounterReformation, as Catholics worked to stamp out religious diversity in the Polish Republic and as the

According to Russian Imperial sources, Sarts exceeded 800,000 people and comprised 26 percent of the population of Turkestan and 44 percent of the urban population of Central Asia in 1880. The term was the subject of lively debate in the late-nineteenth century when Russians colonized Central Asia. Vasily Bartold described the Sarts as settled peoples in Central Asia, Turkicized Old Iranian population, emerging from a conglomeration of Saka, Sogdian, Kwarazmian, and Kush-Bactrians.

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The ancient Turkic word Sart, originally meaning “merchant,” was used by Mongols and Turks by the thirteenth century to identify the Iranian population of Central Asia. In the sixteenth century, Uzbeks who conquered Central Asia used “Sart” to distinguish the sedentary population of Central Asia from the nomadic Turkic groups settling in the region. By the nineteenth century, the urban Sart population had merged cultural, linguistic, and ethnic elements from their Persian and Turko-Mongolian lineage. They remained distinct from Uzbeks even though their language belongs to the Chagatay-Turkic group. On the eve of the Russian Revolution, “Sart” was a self-denomination distinguished from Uzbeks and Tajiks despite the cultural synthesis in Turkestan. Soviet nationality policies made the term obsolete. Following the first counting of the 1926 census, Sarts were listed as a questionable nationality. By the end of 1927, the majority of Sarts were designated as Uzbek and others were named Sart-Kalmyks. They were not considered Tajik because they were Turkic-speaking. Of the 2,880 Sart-Kalmyks listed in the 1926 census, there were 2,550 in Kirgiz ASSR, fewer than 250 in Uzbek SSR (all located in Andijan), and none in Tajik ASSR. By the 1937 census, the ethnic marker disappeared.

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viet Union. The Ministry of Finance directly controlled this network until 1963, when it was incorporated into Gosbank (the state bank of the USSR). Sberbank’s main task was to collect the individual deposits and invest them with the state. In addition, Soviet citizens paid their bills and picked up their pension checks at their local Sberbank offices. After the breakup of the USSR, Sberbank Russia became a quasicommercial savings bank, with the Central Bank of Russia as its majority shareholder. Sberbank continued to invest a high percentage of its resources with the government (e.g., in government securities), giving it the nickname “the Ministry of Cash.” Although commercial banks began to compete with Sberbank for retail deposits, Sberbank’s share of the retail market never fell below 60 percent in the 1990s. This occurred for three reasons. First, no new bank could compete with Sberbank’s extensive branch network. Second, the government explicitly insured deposits in Sberbank, while commercial banks had no deposit insurance system. Third, repeated commercial banking crises made Sberbank appear to be a safer choice than other banks. However, it bears noting that the vast majority of Russians chose to keep their savings outside of the banking system entirely.

CENTRAL ASIA; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES,

SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

See also: BANKING SYSTEM, SOVIET; GOSBANK; STROIBANK

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bregel, Yuri. (1978). “The Sarts in the Khanate of Khiva,” Journal of Asian History 12 (2):120–151.

Johnson, Juliet. (2000). A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Schoeberlein, John. (1994). “Identity in Central Asia: Construction and contention in the conceptions of ‘Özbek,’ ‘Tâjik,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Samarqandi’ and other groups.” Ph.D. diss. Harvard University. MICHAEL ROULAND

Tompson, William. (1998). “Russia’s ‘Ministry of Cash’: Sberbank in Transition.” Communist Economies and Economic Transformation 10(2):133–155. JULIET JOHNSON

SBERBANK

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY

Sberbank (the Savings Bank) was the monopoly, state-owned household savings bank of the USSR. It retained both its state ownership and its dominance of the retail banking market in the postSoviet period, despite increasing competition from commercial banks. In the Soviet period, Sberbank’s retail banking network encompassed approximately 70,000 branches and smaller “cash offices” (sberkassy) on almost every corner across the So-

Leading scientists and policy makers in the Soviet Union rapidly reached an accommodation after the revolution in October 1917. The scientific community was decimated by deaths and emigration that resulted from World War I, revolution, and civil war. Those scientists who remained recognized that the new regime, unlike the tsarist government, intended to support scientific research. They quickly established a number of research institutes and


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stitutes whose focus was basic research fell under the jurisdiction of Glavnauka, while those of an applied profile fell under NTO. When Josef Stalin rose to power in the late 1920s, fundamental changes in science policy occurred that largely held sway until the collapse of the USSR. The changes reflected crash programs in rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. First, officials intended that scientists emphasize applied research at the expense of basic research. This led to the removal of many of the institutes under the jurisdiction of the Glavnauka to the Commissariat of Heavy Industry and the establishment of a technical division within the Academy of Sciences. Second, the Communist Party began a concerted effort to place personnel loyal to it in research institutes. It forced the relatively independent Soviet Academy of Sciences to create many new positions, or chairs, for permanent members in such new fields as the social sciences, and insisted that party members be voted in during elections.

A 1966 experiment in a chemistry laboratory at Akademgorodok—the Siberian “Academic City.” © DEAN CONGER/CORBIS

received gold rubles to buy journal subscriptions, equipment, and reagents abroad. Government officials, for their part, believed that scientific and engineering expertise was critical to the establishment of communism. Hesitantly at first, they offered academic freedom as well as financial and administration support to the scientists. They remained skeptical about the value of fundamental research. Party officials also believed that scientists, most of whom were trained in the tsarist era, required close supervision by loyal communists. Several different bureaucracies were responsible for the administration and funding of science, and scientists were deft at playing them off against each other to increase their funding. The major ones were the Main Scientific Administration of the Commissariat of Education (Glavnauka) and the Scientific Technical Department of the Supreme Economic Council (NTO). Generally speaking, in-

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Third, officials required that scientists produce detailed one-year and five-year plans of research activity. Since the Commissariat of Heavy Industry was relatively flush with funding, scientists found leeway in planning and financial documents to embark on research in several important new directions, for example, nuclear physics and cryogenics in the 1930s. Finally, officials insisted upon strict ideological control over the content of science and effectively established autarchy (international isolation) that persisted until the late 1980s. Party officials had indicated their intention to control scientists in a series of show trials in 1929 and 1930 where they used forced confessions of engineers to prove “wrecking” of plans. They punished wrecking with long prison terms and in some cases execution. During the Great Terror of the mid-1930s, scientists, no less than other members of society, also faced arrest, interrogation, internment in labor camps (there were several special labor camps for scientists and engineers), and execution. Scientists’ professional associations were subjugated to party organizations. Several fields of science suffered from ideological meddling. In the most notorious case, Trofim Lysenko, a biologist who rejected modern genetics, came to dominate the Soviet biology establishment from the 1940s until the early 1960s. The authorities ordered references to genetics removed from textbooks, and many geneticists lost their jobs.


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World War II had a direct and long-term impact on Soviet science policy. First, it ensured continued emphasis on applied research, in particular military technology. Second, with the advent of the atomic bomb project and then rocket technology, it ensured large-scale approaches to research and development. The average size of programs and institutes in the USSR grew to several times larger than similar programs or institutes in other countries. Third, the evacuation of entire institutes and personnel from areas under the siege of German armies led to the dispersal of institutes to the Ural Mountains region and Siberia. Nikita Khrushchev, who followed Stalin, initiated a series of reforms in Soviet society, abandoning some aspects of Stalinism (although maintaining one-party rule). The reforms had an impact on science policy as well. The most significant impact was the growth of the scientific enterprise. The total number of scientists increased from 162,500 in 1950 to 665,000 in 1965, including an increase in the number of senior and junior specialists from 62,000 to 140,000. A second aspect of reform was decentralization of the scientific enterprise, in part because of the growth of the nuclear establishment. The most significant sign of decentralization was the construction of Akademgorodok, a city of science built in the early 1960s with twenty-one institutes, library, and university, near Novosibirsk in Siberia. Another aspect of decentralization was the removal of the technical division of the Academy of Sciences and the placement of its institutes under the jurisdiction of industrial ministries. Under Leonid Brezhnev a number of the Khrushchev-era reforms were abandoned. While there had been such great achievements in science as the first artificial satellite (Sputnik) and successes in nuclear power, Soviet science performed poorly by such measures as scientific citation indices, Nobel prizes, and assimilation of discoveries in production. Rather than experiment with new forms of organization or new directions of research, however, the Brezhnev administration further centralized policy making in major bureaucracies, raised the level of ideological control, and established renewed vigilance toward contact with Western scientists. While the scientific enterprise grew to massive proportions—on the eve of its breakup the USSR had one-third of the world’s engineers and one-quarter of its physicists—it continued to perform poorly.


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Mikhail Gorbachev championed “acceleration” (uskorenie) of the achievements of research into the production process. Like leaders before him, he believed in the power of science to help solve the social, economic, and other problems facing the country. As part of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev’s policies encouraged rapid decentralization of science policy and increasingly open discussion of the poor performance of the sector. Scientists reorganized professional societies for the first time since the 1930s. They gained the opportunity to travel abroad to conferences. Only the collapse of the USSR facilitated significant reevaluation of science policy in Russia. At the same time, because of rapid inflation and decline in government revenues, the scientific establishment lost much of its funding and stability for the first time since the 1920s. Salaries were not paid for months at a time, and research monies disappeared. International organizations offered aid programs to discourage emigration. In general, however, the Russian scientific community has been slow to recover from the political and economic shocks of the 1990s.

See also:

ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; LYSENKO, TROFIM

DENISOVICH; SPACE PROGRAM BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balzer, Harley. (1989). Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Graham, Loren. (1967). The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927–1932. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Graham, Loren. (1987). Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union. New York: Columbia University Press. Joravsky, David. (1970). The Lysenko Affair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lubrano, Linda, and Solomon, Susan. (1980). The Social Context of Soviet Science. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Parrott, Bruce. (1983). Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. PAUL R. JOSEPHSON

SCIENCE FICTION Science fiction is a literary genre that extrapolates from existing knowledge about the real world to speculate about alternative worlds. It always includes an element of the fantastic, since it aims to go beyond what is, to give a literary model of

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“what if?” Unlike pure fantasy or utopian literature, however, science fiction posits a rational exploration of as-yet inexplicable phenomena and unknown corners of the human psyche. In Russia the most important works of science fiction have usually been viewed as subversive to the regime in power because of their ability to model alternative realities, to evade censorship by displacing political allegories to the juvenile realm of cosmic adventure, and to tap into the Russian readership’s persistent longings for a more just society. The first, mid-nineteenth century works of Russian science fiction blend the rational utopianism of European models with the age-old Russian folk vision of communal justice and abundance for all. The idea that Western-oriented scientific and technological progress might be combined in Russia with egalitarian values, avoiding the evils of both autocracy and capitalism, is one of the strongest and most consistent strains in Russian science fiction. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1862 novel What Is to Be Done? created a fictional model of this idea that inspired generations of Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin. Alexander Bogdanov’s The Red Star (1908) depicts a socially and scientifically progressive society on Mars that is superior to existing earthly alternatives. In the decade following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many stories extolled a cosmic revolution, anticipating the victorious spread of classless societies to other planets with the help of futuristic technology and radically evolved human consciousness. As late as the 1970s, the writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky countered official literary depictions of Soviet society with science fiction imaginings of alternative societies where rationality, science, and human freedom are not at odds. A second, and opposing strain, is the dystopian vision of society dehumanized by the relentless rationalization of work, health, social, and spiritual life. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1924, unpublished; 1989) is a brilliant philosophical satire depicting “mathematically happy” workers in the One State, where free will has been all but eliminated. Extrapolating tendencies from both bourgeois and socialist systems of conformity, We insists on the paramount value of individual free will. Zamyatin’s novel, and later Western novels based on similar ideas (e.g., George Orwell’s 1984 ) were banned in the Soviet Union. After 1957, the launch of Sputnik and the gradual relaxation of ideological restrictions inaugurated a new era of Soviet science fiction. In the immensely popular works of Ivan Yefremov and the brothers Stru-

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gatsky, Russian readers found a forum in which their authentic political and cultural aspirations were given a voice—along with an exciting plot. They offered richly imagined histories of the future to remind the reader of the outcome of ethical choices made in the present. Russian literature has often served as the conscience of the nation, and twenty-first century Russian science fiction continues the tradition of ideological engagement, by addressing such themes as contemporary social malaise and the search for a new, post-Soviet Russian cultural identity.

See also:

CHERNYSHEVSKY, NIKOLAI GAVRILOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fetzer, Leland, ed. (1982). Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction: An Anthology. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Gomel, Elana. (1999). “Science Fiction in Russia: From Utopia to New Age.” Science Fiction Studies 26(3): 435–441. Howell, Yvonne. (1994). Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. New York: Peter Lang. Suvin, Darko. (1979). “Russian SF and Its Utopian Tradition.” In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. YVONNE HELEN HOWELL

SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM The term scientific socialism was used by Friedrich Engels to characterize the doctrines that he and Karl Marx developed and distinguish them from other socialist doctrines, which he dismissed as utopian socialism. Engels regarded the Marx-Engels doctrines as scientific in that they laid bare the secret of capitalism through the discovery of surplus value, and explained (with a theory known in the USSR as historical materialism) how capitalism would inevitably be overthrown and replaced by socialism. The concept “scientific socialism” made Marxist doctrines more attractive to many than rival socialist doctrines by suggesting that equality and the end of exploitation were not only desirable but also inevitable. Scientific socialism was introduced to Russia in the late ninenteenth century. After the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, scientific socialism became


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part of the official ideology of the USSR. The term itself was frequently used loosely to designate a doctrine concerning the development of a Soviet type of society. Much of the actual content of the doctrine varied over time in accordance with the concrete policies of the Soviet state. Socialism as a comprehensive social system failed to spread to the advanced capitalist countries (although “pension fund socialism,” the growth of government welfare and regulatory programs, the expansion of employee rights, state-owned industries, public education, and universal suffrage, were widespread and important). This failure, along with other developments such as the collapse of the USSR, indicated that scientific socialism was an imperfect guide to the future. By the end of the twentieth century, the term was mainly of historical interest.

See also:

IDEALISM; MARXISM; SOCIALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Engels, Frederick. (1880). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. . Lichtheim, George. (1962). Marxism. New York: Praeger. MICHAEL ELLMAN

SCISSORS CRISIS The Scissors Crisis occurred in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) era of the 1920s and refers to the movements, over time, of the relative prices of industrial and agricultural products. When the movements of relative prices are presented graphically, the observed patterns resemble the open blades of a pair of scissors; hence the term Scissors Crisis. The observed price movements in the Soviet Union during the 1920s can be explained by the relatively quicker recovery of the agricultural sector (the relative prices of agricultural products falling) vis-à-vis the apparently slower recovery of the industrial sector (the relative prices of industrial goods increasing). This recovery occurred after the collapse of the Soviet economy during the tumultuous era of war communism (1917–1921). Such a pattern of recovery following collapse is not unusual. Moreover, the observed changes in relative prices would be expected in a market economy


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where the degree of decline and the subsequent rate of recovery differ by sector of the economy. The underlying issues of the Scissors Crisis are important to the understanding of Soviet economic policy in the 1920s, especially the response of the Soviet state to these price changes. Soviet agriculture during the NEP was based largely on a private peasant economy. The development of modern agriculture was a major focus, cast within the framework of socialist economic thought. Although industry was recovering after war communism, it was hampered by substantial state ownership and the concentration of industry in the form of trusts, allowing for the exercising of monopoly power. In light of Josef Stalin’s dramatic economic changes beginning in the late 1920s (full nationalization, collectivization of agriculture, and the replacement of markets by the administrative command system), the issues and discussions of the 1920s assume great importance in one’s understanding of Soviet economic history. First, if agriculture is a major component of total output in the economy, and agricultural output is to be both a source of food and a source of financing to promote the process of industrialization, the terms of agricultural production (amount, source, and means of distribution) have a major impact on the size and the distribution of the share dedicated to the financing of industrialization. Second, the nature of property rights and the organizational arrangements in the agricultural sector were both matters of contention during the Soviet pre-plan era. Specifically, during the 1920s, experimentation with different forms of cooperative farm organizations was intended to change production arrangements as well as state access to the agricultural product; these changes could limit or eliminate market forces. Third, Stalin argued, as a major justification for collectivization (beginning in 1929), that in fact the pace of industrialization would be limited by the ability of peasants under private property arrangements to withhold production in part to manipulate (increase) prices. According to Stalin, this would affect the terms of trade between the city and the countryside and thus reduce the pace at which industrialization could be pursued. Fourth, the policies chosen for addressing the Scissors Crisis form an important component of the assessment of the NEP economy of the 1920s. Specifically, it was argued that there was a significant element of monopoly in Soviet industry at

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this time. State policy focused on this issue, threatening good intervention or the introduction of competing imports to force a reduction of industrial prices. In addition, threats were made to limit the access of industry to capital and thus change the behavior of the industrial sector. Although the behavior of agricultural and industrial prices in the Soviet Union during the 1920s can be explained by the underlying market forces of supply and demand, nevertheless within the context of events of the 1920s and subsequent behavior by Stalin, the events of the Scissors Crisis have assumed major importance for understanding the NEP period. Moreover, the issues involved are fundamental components of contemporary theorizing about the process of economic development.

See also:

NEW ECONOMIC POLICY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Nove, Alec. (1982). An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. New York: Penguin. Sah, R. K., and Stiglitz, J. E. (1984). “The Economics of Price Scissors.” The American Economic Review 74(1): 125–138. ROBERT C. STUART

region. By the third century B.C.E., the Scythians came under pressure of the nomadic Sarmatians who destroyed and absorbed most of them into their loosely-organized tribal structure. Nomadic in origins, the Scythian peoples and the “Scythian” culture also included agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers who paid tribute to their nomadic lords with grain and other goods that the nomads could not produce themselves. In turn, these items were traded with the Greek colonial cities of the northern Black Sea region for wine, precious metals, and other goods. While Scythia proper, as it was known in GrecoRoman sources, was located to the north of the Black Sea region (from the Danube to the lower Don and Volga), “Scythic” culture occupied a much greater territory of Eurasia, stretching as far east as southwestern Siberia and eastern Kazakhstan. Elements of this culture can be summarized as follows: the use of (1) iron; (2) short swords; (3) conservative artistic motifs (especially the animal style, e.g., the stag and the animal combat); (4) nomadic lifestyle organized around a patriarchal, little centralized social structure; (5) improved compound bows; (6) bronze cauldrons; (7) making of deerstones; and, (8) complex horse harness. All of these components were shared across a huge area not only by Iranian-speakers, but also by Turkic and Mongolian nomads of steppelands of Inner Eurasia.

See also:

SCYTHIANS The Scythians were a large confederation of Iranian-speaking (or headed by an Iranian-speaking military-political elite) tribal unions, known in classical sources since around the eighth century B.C.E. or about the time they migrated to the North Pontic steppe zone where they supplanted and apparently absorbed some of the Cimmerians who occupied the region. As with their predecessors, it is not clear from where the Scythians migrated, but their most likely homeland was Central Asia from where they moved under pressure of other nomadic peoples. Organized in supra-tribal confederations, the Scythians made raids and full-blown invasions from the northern Caucasus into Media and Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, reaching as far as Palestine and Egypt throughout the period of 670–610 B.C.E. After suffering major defeats towards the end of the seventh century, they transferred their locus of power to the North Pontic

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christian, David. (1998). A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia Vol. 1: Inner Asia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire. Oxford, UK/Malden, MA: Blackwell. Golden, Peter B. (1990). “The Peoples of the South Russian Steppe.” In The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia. ed. Denis Sinor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talbot-Rice, Tamara (1957). The Scythians [Ancient Peoples and Places, vol. 2], ed. G. Daniel. London: Thames and Hudson. ROMAN K. KOVALEV

SECOND ECONOMY The second economy of the USSR included economic activities that supplemented the command, or first, economy. As defined by Gregory Gross-


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man, the second economy consisted of all production and exchange undertaken directly for private gain, knowingly illegal in some substantial way, or both. This definition encompassed both legal and illegal activities, but most studies focus on the illegal part, also referred to as underground, unofficial, or shadow economy, or the black market. The legal second economy was made up mainly of private agriculture, small-scale construction services, extraction of precious metals, hunting of valuable wild animals, and certain professional services, such as those provided by physicians, dentists, and tutors. The illegal economy was significantly larger than the legal part of the second economy. Legal private activities often served as fronts for illegal ones. The most common illegal economic activity in the USSR was theft of state property. Presumably the second-most widespread illegal activity was the corruption that reached into the highest echelons of power; one purpose of corruption was to protect the functioning of the rest of the illegal economy. Another major illegal activity was speculation, defined as resale of goods by individuals for profit. Unlike theft from the state sector and corruption, which would be illegal anywhere, speculation was a crime only in socialist economies. Illegal production by individuals or by teams was also significant. Much of the illegal production for private purposes took place at state enterprises. Output was usually sold privately, but sometimes it was distributed through the official retail trade network. Private manufacturing without an official facade also existed. None of the major conditions giving rise to the existence of a large underground economy were unique to the USSR, but the way they came together in Soviet society was unusual and created a highly favorable environment for an illegal economy. These conditions included price controls on virtually all consumer goods, the prohibition of many private economic activities and high taxes on others, the ubiquity and poor protection of public property, the immense discretionary power of poorly paid bureaucrats, and social attitudes that tolerated theft of state property, corruption, and many other economic illegalities. While the Soviet second economy was large, its magnitude, especially in the illegal sphere, is difficult to ascertain. One widely used way to estimate the extent of the second economy was based on interviewing emigrants from the USSR about their


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lives prior to emigration. Three major surveys were performed in Israel and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. The Berkeley-Duke household budget survey, the only one focused explicitly on the second economy, implied that about 27 percent of urban household income in Russia in the late 1970s was derived from the second economy. The corresponding estimates from the other two surveys were about half that amount. Evaluating second economy dynamics is even more difficult. One methodology infers the growth of the second economy from comparisons of electricity consumption with the official Gross Domestic Product. This approach indicates that Russia’s second economy grew by more than 80 percent between 1979 and 1989. The rise of the second economy amounted to an implicit market reform within the Soviet system, but it also facilitated or even compelled the partial reforms of perestroika, which expanded the scope of the legal second economy. Nonetheless, the illegal and quasi-legal economy also mushroomed, undermining central planning and leading to the economic transition to markets starting in 1992. During the transition, the notion of a second economy was restricted to illegal activities, the growth of which continued throughout the 1990s. The reasons for this growth included persistent excessive regulation of the economy, high statutory tax rates, weakening of official institutions and their inability to protect property rights protection and enforce contracts, lack of credibility of government reform policies, and continued corruption. The illegal second economy may have benefited from the emergence of the mafia, which taxes underground firms but also provides property rights protection for its victim/clients. The existence of a large second economy, and particularly its illegal part, had important implications for Russia’s economy both before and after the collapse of the USSR. First, underground activity hinders an accurate understanding of the economy and impedes policy-making by distorting various statistics, including GDP data, household incomes and their distribution, and employment. Additionally, the illegal economy weakens the feedback to policy-makers on government decisions and actions, undermines official institutions, and promotes corruption. From an efficiency point of view, the illegal economy suffers from the black market’s need for secrecy, which results in poor flows of information, greater operational uncertainty, and suboptimally small-scale production.

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Economic distortions also appear because some activities are easier to hide than others. At the same time, the second economy often benefits a centrally planned economy by improving incentives and resource allocation. During the post-Soviet transition, the existence of the second economy restricted the government’s ability to tax and regulate excessively. On the margin, the net balance between the second economy’s costs and benefits to society depends on its size and other factors, and is a difficult empirical question.

See also:

BLACK MARKET; COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE

ECONOMY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexeev, Michael, and Pyle, William. (2003). “A Note on Measuring the Unofficial Economy in the Former Soviet Republics.” Economics of Transition 11(1): 153–175. Grossman, Gregory. (1977). “The ‘Second Economy’ of the USSR.” Problems of Communism 26(5):25–40. Grossman, Gregory. (1979). “Notes on the Illegal Private Economy and Corruption.” In Soviet Economy in a Time of Change, Vol. 1, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Grossman, Gregory. (1982). “The ‘Shadow Economy’ in the Socialist Sector of the USSR.” In The CMEA FiveYear Plans (1981–1985) in New Perspective. Brussels: NATO Colloquium. Johnson, Simon; Kaufmann, Daniel; and Shleifer, Andrei. (1997). “The Unofficial Economy in Transition.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2:159–239. Leitzel, Jim. (1995). Russian Economic Reform. New York: Routledge. Schneider, Friedrich, and Enste, Dominik. (2000). “Shadow Economies: Size, Causes, and Consequences.” Journal of Economic Literature 38(1):77–114. Treml, Vladimir, and Alexeev, Michael. (1994). “The Growth of the Second Economy in the Soviet Union and Its Impact.” In Issues in the Transformation of Centrally Planned Economies, ed. Robert Campbell. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. MICHAEL ALEXEEV

Committee headquarters (“the Center”) in Moscow at the top to the republics, provinces, and cities below, secretariats were the Party’s hands-on executive organs. They controlled the work of more than 200,000 full-time officials and employees, known collectively as the nomenklatura. The second secretaries were key figures because at every level of authority they controlled the appointment of Party and government officials. The topmost secretary in Moscow was general secretary, or sometimes called the first secretary. The latter term was likewise applied to local number-one secretaries at the middle and lower rungs of the Party hierarchy. Second-in-command in these secretariats was the second secretary. His function was to administer crucial personnel matters throughout the given political-administrative region or locale in the USSR. In republics or other units where the first secretary was drawn from a titular ethnic group, the second secretary was always a Russian for oversight. The second secretary had the authority to appoint and dismiss nomenklaturists at the various levels of Party and government rule. Any number of Party functionaries who were later promoted from below to Moscow Center earned their status by having served as second secretaries. In Josef Stalin’s time, one of the most powerful officials of this kind was Georgy Malenkov, who functioned largely as Stalin’s number-two man-in-charge of personnel, or de facto second secretary. Like other second secretaries, top to bottom, Malenkov was also a member of the Party’s most important political organ, the Politburo, which at the local levels was called the “Buro.” After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Malenkov functioned briefly as first secretary and then was transferred to the office of prime minister of the USSR. It was not unusual for former secretaries, especially second secretaries, to assume high government office at some level of Party or state administration. Any number of important Party officials and members of the central Politburo were first secretaries at one time or another, and many were also once second secretaries on lower rungs of the Party hierarchy.

The second secretary was the number-two position at every level, from top to bottom, of the administrative apparatus (secretariat) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). From Central

In the final period of Soviet rule (after 1985), Yegor Ligachev was perhaps the best-known second secretary. After serving as a second secretary in various provincial administration, he was transferred to Moscow in 1983. There, because he was in charge of personnel affairs at the top, Ligachev became the second most powerful figure in the

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party when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985. Ligachev was soon embroiled in policy and personnel disputes with both Gorbachev and the then first secretary of the Moscow Party apparatus, Boris Yeltsin. As second secretary, Ligachev remained a key figure in the regime down to the demise of communist and Soviet rule in Russia in late 1991.

tee. Attention usually focused on the General Secretary, and to a lesser degree, the dozen or so Secretaries who worked with him, rather than the larger bureaucracy that constituted the Secretariat.

See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; GEN-

Huskey, Eugene. (1992). Executive Power and Soviet Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Soviet State. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

ERAL SECRETARY; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

See also:

COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nogee, Joseph L., ed. (1985). Soviet Politics: Russia after Brezhnev. New York: Praeger.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reshetar, John S. (1971). The Soviet Polity Government and Politics in the USSR. New York: Dodd, Mead.

Smith, Gordon B. (1992). Soviet Politics: Struggling with Change, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Towster, Julian. (1948). Political Power in the USSR, 1917–1947: The Theory and Structure of Government in the Soviet State. New York: Oxford University Press. Weeks, Albert L. (1987). The Soviet Nomenklatura: A Comprehensive Roster of Soviet Civilian and Military Officials. Washington, DC: Washington Institute Press. ALBERT L. WEEKS

SECRETARIAT The Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was the administrative arm of the Communist Party. Initially a handful of party workers, the Secretariat evolved into a powerful bureaucracy with oversight of the entire Soviet political system and economy. Although the size of the Secretariat was modest in comparison to the giant governmental bureaucracy, its power was not. It was the apparat and those who worked in the Secretariat were the apparatchiki. Headed by the General (or First) Secretary and the other Secretaries of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Secretariat became the body that ensured that Soviet political and economic organs followed party policy. Josef Stalin was responsible for building the Secretariat, and Nikita Khrushchev was responsible for reaffirming and renewing its power. Its influence diminished only under Mikail Gorbachev, who in his final years, turned to the power of the Presidency and a Presidential Cabinet of Ministers, which was created in 1990. At the height of its power, the Secretariat headed by its powerful General Secretary determined the agenda of the Politburo and the Central Commit-


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SECTARIANISM Religious dissent from the Russian Orthodox Church. The word sect entered the Russian language in the eighteenth century from the Latin word secta. Long used in the Catholic Church to indicate groups or parties that had separated themselves from orthodox teaching, the word was adopted by the Russian Orthodox Church during the reign of Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) to label the increasing numbers of religious dissenters. The first substantial movement of Christian dissent occurred only in the seventeenth century in response to the liturgical and bureaucratic innovations of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow (r. 1652–1658). By the 1680s, those who opposed these new reforms called themselves “Old Believers”; many of them withdrew from the Church and society to create their own purified communities on the outskirts of the Muscovite state. Although Old Believers were sometimes tarred with the label “sect,” by the late nineteenth century Russian Orthodox heresiology began to reserve the word sectarian for the growing numbers of religious dissenters who had separated themselves from the state church for reasons other than Nikon’s reforms. In accordance with this usage, this article deals only with those sectarians who were not Old Believers. It also does not deal with the fourteenth-century Judaizers and its predecessors.

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THE FAITH OF CHRIST (FLAGELLANTS) AND THE CASTRATES

The Faith of Christ (khristovshchina) arose in the seventeenth century. Its members continued to visit the Orthodox state church, but also met in secret assemblies where they repeated the Jesus prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner) until the Holy Spirit descended upon them and they danced, prophesied, and spoke in tongues. In their secret assemblies, they believed that they had recovered the original faith and practice of Christ. Following a realized eschatology, they also believed that Christ had returned spiritually to dwell in their leaders whom they called Christs and Mothers of God. They composed a rich repertoire of spiritual songs celebrating these leaders and their faith. The adherents of the Faith of Christ practiced an intense asceticism that included celibacy, restricted diet, long periods of prayer, and fasting. Over time, some of them flagellated themselves, and so they became known as flagellants. This label was applied indiscriminately to many different sectarians, most of whom did not practice flagellation. The Faith of Christ established broad religious, social, and economic networks across the Russian Empire. The grave of the monastery peasant Danilo Filippov (d. c. 1700), one of the early leaders of the sect, was located in a small village near Kostroma; it attracted pilgrims from cities and towns all over central Russia for at least two centuries. The members of the Faith of Christ used money earned in the textile trade to support their co-religionists who entered Orthodox monasteries. In 1733 and again in 1745, extensive state investigations sought to eliminate the movement by arresting and sentencing hundreds of suspects. By forcing the defendants to confess falsely to horrible crimes of secret mass orgies, infanticide, and cannibalism, the inquisitors of the second commission helped to create a powerful myth that envisioned the flagellants as a dangerous, homicidal, sexually perverted fifth column within Russian society. By the 1760s, some members of the Faith of Christ, not satisfied with vows of celibacy, began castrating themselves. Under the leadership of the fugitive peasant Kondraty Selivanov (d. 1832), these castrates broke away from the Faith of Christ and created their own peculiar rituals and eschatology. In its rich tradition of spiritual songs, the Castrates claimed that their leader Selivanov was actually Emperor Peter III (r. 1762)—the unfortunate husband of Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796).

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Though the real Peter III was killed in Catherine’s 1762 coup, the Castrates held that he actually escaped to Orel province where, as the peasant Kondratii Selivanov, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. After Catherine’s death, the legend claims that Emperor Paul (r. 1796–1801) recalled Selivanov to St. Petersburg, where he recognized him as his father. Although Selivanov lived and taught freely in St. Petersburg from 1802 to 1820, he spent the last twelve years of his life in a monastery prison in Suzdal. Thanks in part to their severe asceticism, many of the Castrates became wealthy merchants. Because they were severely persecuted, the Castrates outwardly adhered to the Orthodox Church and often proved to be generous patrons. SPIRITUAL CHRISTIANITY: DUKHOBORS AND MOLOKANS

Spiritual Christianity, another powerful strain of sectarianism, arose as an apocalyptic movement in the 1760s in the black-earth region of Tambov province. Preaching that the day of the Lord was imminent, Ilarion Pobirokhin (fl. 1762–1785) called on true Christians to stop venerating icons and to reject the Orthodox sacraments and priesthood. Instead of kissing icons, they kissed one another, and especially their leader, as the image of God. They met together regularly to read the Bible, sing spiritual psalms of their own composition, and listen to their teachers’ sermons. Despite state efforts to repress them, the Spiritual Christians, who were also called the Dukhobors (Spirit-Wrestlers), survived. In an effort to isolate them from their Orthodox neighbors, the Russian state in 1802 first resettled them in Melitopol in Crimea, and then in 1841–1845 forcibly moved them to the Caucasus. In these isolated colonies, the Dukhobors largely governed themselves and followed their own folkways. Led by charismatic descendants of Pobirokhin and a Council of Elders, the Dukhobors preached that God’s Spirit lived in all people, both men and women. Although they used the Bible, they emphasized their own oral tradition of spiritual psalms, which they called the Living Book. By the 1880s, the Dukhobors numbered about twenty thousand. A radical group of Dukhobors led by Petr Verigin (d. 1935) preached pacificism, rejected military service, and struggled to take over the community in 1886–1898. In 1898, Verigin led his followers to immigrate to Canada.


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A second group of Spiritual Christians, known as the Molokans (milk-drinkers, because they did not observe the Orthodox fasting periods in which milk was forbidden), broke away from the Dukhobors. Semen Uklein (d. 1809), an erstwhile follower of Ilarion Pobirokhin, insisted on the authority of the Bible, and went on to preach his own version of Spiritual Christianity throughout the provinces of the lower Volga in 1790s. Like the Dukhobors, the Molokans rejected icons, sacraments, and priesthood. But as serious students of the Bible, Uklein’s followers also observed Old Testament holidays and dietary restrictions. In the 1830s, a group of inspired apocalyptic Molokan prophets predicted that the world would end in 1836 and introduced ecstatic dancing and singing into the Molokan meetings. Lukian Petrov Sokolov (d. 1858) led his followers to Mount Ararat to await the return of Christ. Despite the failure of this prophecy, these Molokan “Jumpers” retained their ecstatic practices and regrouped under a new charismatic leader, Maksim Rudometikin (d. 1877). From the late nineteenth century, new prophets taught pacifism and their new apocalyptic visions encouraged the Jumpers to emigrate and establish colonies in California, South America, Mexico, and Arizona. WESTERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

In the 1830s, German pietists introduced a revival in the German colonies of the Ukraine. By the 1860s, this revival, which emphasized personal prayer and a Bible study hour [Stunde in German], had been adopted by Ukrainian and Russian peasants who lived near the German colonists. Although initially these Shtundists, as they came to be called, wanted to remain in the Orthodox Church, the Orthodox hierarchy rejected their independent Bible studies and the Protestant doctrine of salvation through faith alone. Ultimately, many of these Ukrainian and Russian peasants turned away from Orthodoxy to embrace Baptism. In 1867, Nikita Voronin, a convert from Molokanism, was the first Russian to receive baptism. A Russian Baptist Union was created in 1884. Other Protestant movements also gained Russian adherents. German and American preachers brought Seventh-Day Adventism into Russia in the 1880s. In the 1870s in the northern capital of St. Petersburg, the pietistic preaching of the English Lord Radstock established a pietistic following that later helped to support the formation of a Union of Evangelical Christians in 1909.


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Overwhelmed by the 1905 revolution, the tsarist government issued an edict of religious toleration that allowed much greater freedom of worship—though not of proselytizing—to most sectarians. Baptists, Molokans, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Evangelical Christians created their own legal organizations, published newspapers, books, and journals. A 1912 census counted 393,565 sectarians (not including the Old Believers). Taken together, Baptists and Evangelical Christians were the largest group, with more than 143,000 adherents; Molokans represented the next largest group with 133,935.

THE SOVIET PERIOD

After the 1917 revolution, the Bolshevik government initially courted sectarians, but this policy came to an end in 1929 with the First Five Year Plan. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union attempted to eliminate religion altogether by closing and destroying churches and arresting religious leaders. This policy failed, and resistance to the forced collectivization of agriculture actually provoked new apocalyptic sectarian movements which attacked the Soviet state as the “red dragon” of the Apocalypse. Persecution of the Orthodox Church forced some of its members underground to form the True Orthodox Church. Rejecting the Moscow Patriarchate as hopelessly compromised, the members of the True Orthodox Church claimed that they alone maintained the true faith. The German invasion of the USSR in 1941 forced Josef Stalin to moderate his antireligious policies and to allow limited legal existence of sectarian groups. In 1944, Baptists and Evangelical Christians formed the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians and Baptists, and soon Adventists also were granted a national organization. Dissatisfaction with the limits on religious freedom and a renewed antireligious campaign under Nikita Khrushchev led some Baptists and Adventists to form independent, underground organizations in the 1960s: the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists and the True and Free Seventh-Day Adventists. The Soviet period also witnessed the vigorous growth of Pentecostals, who had first appeared in Russia in 1913. In the 1970s and 1980s, circles of educated urban intellectuals sometimes faced persecution for their interest and participation in Eastern religions, including Tibetan Buddhism and the Hare Krishna movement.

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In 1990 the Soviet parliament passed a law allowing complete religious freedom and ushered in a new, open spiritual marketplace. Missionaries from the United States and Western Europe helped to establish and finance Mormon ward, Jehovah’s Witnesses kingdom halls, and charismatic and evangelical churches. Underground movements, such as the True Orthodox Christians, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, and the Baptist Council of Churches, emerged to compete in the new atmosphere. The new freedom, and the collapse of the Soviet economic and political systems, also encouraged the formation of new sectarian movements. Distressed by the moral degeneration of Russian society, prophets from the Church of the Transfiguring Theotokos claimed that the Mother of God had appeared to warn Russia and the world of an impending judgment. The White Brotherhood, a syncretic movement, combining elements of Hinduism and Orthodox Christianity, gathered to witness the end of the world in Kiev in 1993. Alarmed by these apocalyptic movements and by the influx of foreign missionaries, the Russian parliament in 1997 passed a new law that favored the traditional religions of Russia. Local administrations have interpreted the law quite differently, so that the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have peacefully established their headquarters in St. Petersburg, have also had to defend themselves in Moscow courts. Sectarianism first became significant in Russia in the seventeenth century. On the one hand, sectarianism represented the growth of individual initiative and freedom, as religious virtuosi took upon themselves the responsibility of constructing and living out new religious visions. But on the other hand, the classification and enumeration of sects reflect the growth of bureaucratic systems of social control in both state and church. The continued vitality of sectarianism in the twenty-first century is a product of the dialectic between these two opposite trends.

See also:

OLD BELIEVERS; ORTHODOXY; PROTESTANTISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, John. (1994). Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bolshakoff, Serge. (1950). Russian Nonconformity: The Story of “Unofficial” Religion in Russia. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

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Conybeare, Frederick C. (1962). Russian Dissenters. New York: Russell and Russell. Engelstein, Laura. (1999). Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sawatsky, Walter. (1981). Soviet Evangelicals since World War II. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press. Witte, John, and Bourdeaux, Michael, eds. (1999). Proselytism and Orthodoxy in Russia: The New War for Souls. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press. J. EUGENE CLAY

SECURITY COUNCIL The April 1991 law creating the office of president of the Russian Federation also created a Security Council, succeeding the security council created by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1990 and presumably modeled after the National Security Council in the United States. Formally established by a March 1992 law, the Security Council was chaired by the president and met once per month, with a staff of about two hundred and half a dozen commissions working at its direction. Since 1993 its membership has varied, at the discretion of the president, from seven officials in 1996 to more than twenty-five since 2000, when it included the prime minister and the heads of the “power ministries” (defense, foreign affairs, interior, emergencies, Federal Border Service, and Federal Security Service) plus the justice minister, the procurator-general, the heads of the two houses of parliament, and the governors of the seven federal districts created by President Vladimir Putin. Back in 1992 the Security Council was supervised by State Secretary Gennady Burbulis, and its first secretary was the industrialist Yuri Skokov. It was seen as a conservative counter-balance to the liberal foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev. Some speculated that it might become a new Politburo, well-insulated from democratic accountability. In practice the council never became a decision-making forum, but merely provided analysis and advice to the president. It was supposed to exercise a coordinating role and enforce and extend presidential control, but in practice the ministries of defense and foreign affairs jealously guarded their autonomy. The council was periodically tasked with drawing up guidelines or concepts for Russian foreign policy, but these did not have much


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influence on actual decision-making. And far from being a springboard for ambitious politicians, it was more a tool for Boris Yeltsin to balance rival figures. Skokov was replaced as secretary in June 1993 by a former Soviet general, Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, and then in October 1993 by a Yeltsin crony, Oleg Lobov. In June 1996 Alexander Lebed was appointed secretary, in return for his support of Yeltsin in the second round of the presidential election. Lebed was assigned to end the war in Chechnya, and much to everyone’s surprise he succeeded, signing a peace accord and withdrawing Russian troops. Concerned about Lebed’s growing popularity, Yeltsin created a separate Defense Council in July and fired Lebed in October, accusing him of plotting a military coup. Lebed was replaced by the anodyne politician Ivan Rybkin, with the controversial oligarch Boris Berezovsky as his deputy, in charge of reconstructing Chechnya. (Berezovsky quit in November 1997.) From March to September 1998, the Security Council was headed by an academic, Andrei Kokoshin. He was replaced by a KGB general, Nikolai Boryuzha, who in turn was followed in March 1999 by Vladimir Putin, who was simultaneously head of the Federal Security Service (FSB). In November 1999 Putin was replaced at the council by his deputy at the FSB, Sergei Ivanov. In March 2001 Ivanov became defense minister, and the former interior minister, Vladimir Rushailo, became Security Council secretary. During Vladimir Putin’s presidency, the Security Council became slightly more visible as a forum through which he tried to press forward with military reforms obstinately resisted by the generals. The new National Security Concept drawn up by the council in 2000 stressed internal threats, such as Chechen terrorism, over traditional security concerns, such as nuclear deterrence.

See also:

POLITBURO; PRESIDENCY; PRESIDENTIAL COUN-

CIL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Jan. S. (1996). “The Russian National Security Council.” Problems of Post-Communism 43(1):35–42. Derleth, J. William. (1996). “The Evolution of the Russian Polity: The Case of the Security Council.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 29(1):43–58. PETER RUTLAND


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SERAPION BROTHERS The Serapion Brothers were a group of poets and writers who insisted on the political autonomy of the artist and the affirmation of imagination and creative art. They argued that in order to remain authentic, the writer’s voice needed freedom from all social or political constraints. They denounced the use of literature for utilitarian purposes and never adopted a specific model of literary production. The Serapion Brothers began meeting in 1921 at the Petrograd House of Arts at the suggestion of Viktor Shklovsky. The group, which eventually included Konstantin Fedin, Ilya Gruzdev, Vsevolod Ivanov, Veniamin Kaverin, Lev Lunts, Nikolai Nikitin, Elizaveta Polonskaya, Vladimir Pozner, Mikhail Slonimsky, Nikolai Tikhonov, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, adopted its name after a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Shklovsky occasionally participated, and Maxim Gorky supported members with material assistance and help in publishing their work. The group met weekly to read and discuss one another’s work, focusing on the refinement of the craft of writing and leaving each member to develop his or her own message, sometimes engaging in heated debates about the purpose or meaning of literature. The closest the Brotherhood came to publishing a manifesto was Lev Lunts’s “Why We are the Serapion Brothers” (Pochemu my Serapionovy Bratya, 1922), in which he proclaimed that “Art is real, like life itself. And, like life itself, it is without goal and without meaning: It exists because it cannot help but exist.” This statement of the group’s purpose sparked a sharp debate with Marxist critics who insisted on the utilitarian use of literature for common ideological purposes. Lunts, however, stressed the autonomy of literature from political purposes or control and, simultaneously, the preservation of diverse ideological positions within the brotherhood. The one collective work the group published, the First Almanac (Serapionovy Brat’ia. Al’mankh pervy, 1922) demonstrates this wide range of style and philosophy. Throughout the 1920s they promoted a nonpolitical approach to literature, tolerance, and friendship, and their connections continued after the group’s dissolution in 1929.

See also:

CULTURAL REVOLUTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hickey, Martha Weitzel. (1999). “Recovering the Author’s Part: The Serapion Brothers in Petrograd.” Russian Review 58(1):103–123.

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Kern, Gary, and Collins, Christopher, eds. (1975). The Serapion Brothers: A Critical Anthology. Ann Arbor: Ardis. ELIZABETH JONES HEMENWAY

SERBIA, RELATIONS WITH From the first days of the initial Serb uprising in 1804 (against the tyranny of the Janissaries, military units that had evolved from being the elite troops of the Ottoman Empire into semi-independent occupiers) until 1878 (when Belgrade obtained complete independence from the Porte at the Congress of Berlin), relations with Serbia were central to Russia’s foreign policy. However, as Serbia pursued both independence from Istanbul and expansion of the state to include all Serb lands (Bosnia, Hercegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Vojvodina), Russia often found itself drawn into Serbian foreign affairs as Belgrade came to depend upon (and use) Russian support for its own ends. This led to a relationship that offered Serbia the greatest advantages as St. Petersburg became captive to two critical forces: 1) the emergence of Panslavism, a movement that stressed the solidarity of the Slavic peoples ostensibly under Russian leadership, and 2) the Eastern Question, the increasing vacuum in southeastern Europe brought about by the rapid decay of the once great Ottoman Empire, which presented an inviting target of opportunity for the great powers. The romantic image of Orthodox Christians fighting the Muslim Turks for freedom continuously vexed St. Petersburg. On the one hand, advisers generally supported a policy of moderation in the region and a concentration on domestic needs. However, Panslavists, who had a powerful effect upon Russian public opinion, attacked the notion of passivity toward their Christian and Slavic brethren who, they claimed, were suffering at the hands of either the Turks or the Habsburgs.

the Serbian army, and by 1876 Serbia was at war with the Porte. The conflict however was disastrous for Serbia. Not only was the country poorly prepared for war, but friction arose between the Russian and Serbian forces as Chernyayev proved to be an inept commander. While events inside Serbia deteriorated, St. Petersburg concluded a series of agreements with Vienna, providing that in the event Russia went to war with the Turks, the Habsburgs would be neutral. In April 1877, Panslavist pressure forced Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov to join the conflict, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Despite military setbacks, Russia forced the Turks to sign the Treaty of San Stefano. However, Russia’s victory proved to be short-lived as the other great powers quickly blocked St. Petersburg’s designs to obtain primacy in the region through the creation of a “big” Bulgaria. At the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the powers compelled Russia to concede on the issue of an enlarged Bulgarian state, while the Turks were forced to grant complete independence to Serbia (as well as Romania and Greece). However, Russian support for Bulgaria had alienated Belgrade. For the next quarter-century, Serbia distanced itself from Russia. Only the murder of King Alexander Obrenovic in 1903 and the assumption of power by Peter Karadjordjevic led to a reorientation of Serbian policy back to regional cooperation and a reliance on Russia (especially after the Bosnian crisis of 1908–1909, which saw the formal annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina by Austria-Hungary).

After the disastrous Crimean War and the subsequent humiliating Treaty of Paris in 1856, Russia was confronted by conflicting goals: the need to deal with internal problems as well as to restore its influence in the Balkans. When a revolt began in Hercegovina against the Turks in 1875, the lore and lure of Slavic Christians rising up against their Muslim occupiers proved to be intoxicating. Russians immediately volunteered to support the insurrection. General M. G. Chernyayev took command of

Weakened by the events of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and the Revolution of 1905, Russia could not challenge Vienna in 1908 on behalf of its Serbian client state. Nevertheless, the Bosnian crisis pushed Belgrade and St. Petersburg closer together. The former became solely dependent upon Russia for support among the great powers, while the latter realized that it had to support its Serbian ally in the future lest it lose influence in the region. Russia now sought to foster a regional alliance between Serbia and Bulgaria, an act that led to the formation of a Balkan League and subsequently the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. These wars, the unintended consequence of Russia’s attempt to create a defensive alliance in the region to counter the Habsburgs, further destabilized southeastern Europe and left Russia even more tethered to Belgrade.

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During the days and weeks following the assassination of Habsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, Russia steadfastly backed its sole remaining Balkan ally, a critical factor leading to the outbreak of World War I. In its attempt to support Belgrade against Austro-Hungarian demands, Russia now found itself immersed in a conflict for which it was ill prepared and that would lead to the destruction of the Romanov monarchy.

See also: BULGARIA, RELATIONS WITH; MONTENEGRO, RELATIONS WITH; PANSLAVISM; TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH; YUGOSLAVIA, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Glenny, Misha. (2000). The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–1999. New York: Viking Penguin. Jelavich, Barbara. (1974). St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814–1974. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jelavich, Charles, and Jelavich, Barbara. (1977). The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Rossos, Andrew. (1981). Russia and the Balkans: InterBalkan Rivalries and Russian Foreign Policy, 1908–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. RICHARD FRUCHT

SEREDNYAKI The serednyaki, or middle peasants, were peasants whose households in the 1920s had enough land to support their extended family (dvor) and sometimes even the hiring of one of the poorer bednyaki or landless batraki of the neighborhood in busy seasons. In practice, some of the middle peasants lived no differently from the poorer classes; they too had no draft horse (malomoshchnyi) and might likewise hire out a family member in the village community or send him to a nearby city or rural enterprise as wage labor. Many were illiterate. Other members of this intermediate stratum of peasants, however, were prosperous (zazhitochnye or krepkie) and thus close to the richer kulaks who constituted about 5 to 7 percent of the peasantry. These better-off peasants would sell some surplus grain if provided an incentive in the form of manufactured goods, and thus were crucial to the alliance of workers and peasants (smychka) that was supposed


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to be the political basis of the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 to 1928. Although the Marxist-Leninist categories barely fit the complex reality of the Russian countryside, Vladimir Lenin expected the serednyaki to be tolerant of Bolshevik power and policies in the rural areas, and saw them as a temporary ally until such time as the regime could afford to incorporate them into more modern collective farms. There was a danger, however, that industrious middle peasants who prospered would became petty bourgeois allies of the kulaks and thus would oppose Soviet industrialization and the heavy taxes and price discrimination it required. The Marxist-Leninist category of middle peasant, unlike the traditional terms bednyak or kulak, meant little to the peasants themselves. Many other factors besides ownership of productive capital influenced their behavior. Populist students of the peasantry, notably A. V. Chayanov, and later sociologists have challenged this conceptualization of the NEP village as too static. The schematic class analysis of the Soviet countryside was not merely ideological. Depending on one’s class, one could obtain benefits or avoid penalties. Poor peasants enjoyed tax exemptions and preferential admission to schools and Communist Party organizations; kulaks (along with priests and the bourgeois) were deprived of these and even of the right to vote. Late in the NEP, taxes on middle peasants increased, though not as much as those imposed on the kulaks. Not surprisingly, middle peasants endeavored to be officially identified as poor—for example, by referring to past proletarian occupations. They would sometimes try to hide their prosperity by hiring out some labor or a horse. Nonetheless, when forced requisitioning of grain was reinstated in 1928, the prosperous peasants were affected adversely. “Dekulakization” and collectivization in 1929 to 1931 made it even more important to avoid official identification with the richest peasant stratum.

See also:

KULAKS; PEASANT ECONOMY; PEASANTRY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1991). “The Problem of Class Identity in NEP Society.” In Russia in the Era of NEP, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lewin, Moshe. (1968). Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. London: Allen & Unwin.

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Shanin, Teodor. (1972). The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia, 1910–1925. London: Oxford University Press. MARTIN C. SPECHLER

SERFDOM Serfdom is the name of the condition of a peasant who does not enjoy the rights of a free person, but is not a slave. While the slave is an object of the law, the serf is still a subject of the law. The classic definition of serfdom in the Russian context is given in Jerome Blum’s Lord and Peasant in Russia (pp. 6–8). Thus a serf is a peasant who (1) is bound to the land; or (2) is bound to the person of a lord; and (3) is not directly subject to the state, but is subject to a lord who in turn is subject to the state (such as it may be). Thus a serf bound to the land cannot be moved by any lord, and is supposed to be a “fixture” on that land regardless of who owns or holds the land. But if a serf is bound to the person of a lord, he essentially begins to resemble a slave in that the lord nearly becomes the owner of the serf: the lord can move the serf from one plot of land to another (or even into his household), and may even be able to sell the serf to a third party. The first and second conditions are mutually exclusive, for a serf cannot be bound to the land and simultaneously bound to the person of a lord. The third condition is most difficult to comprehend, but can arise under one of two circumstances: either state power does not exist (as during the manorial era of Russia in the early period of the “Mongol yoke,” from 1237 to 1300 or even 1350) and thus the sole extant conflict-resolution power is exercised by a large estate owner, or the existing state power has abdicated or ceded judicial or taxing authority to the owner or holder of land. The third condition can exist by itself or in conjunction with the first or second conditions.

the reigning system of slash-and-burn (assartage) agriculture, peasants were accustomed to farming a new plot of land every three years and could freely move away from any manorial lord who was the slightest bit oppressive. Thus no one views any of the peasants of Russia as “serfs” until the second half of the fifteenth century. Serfdom began as a result of the civil war of 1425–1453, which left much of Russia in ruins. Selected monasteries were allowed to forbid their peasant debtors to move at any time except around St. George’s Day (November 26—compare with the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday), the day in the pagan calendar when the harvest was completed and thus debts could be collected. In 1497 the St. George’s Day limitation was extended to all peasants; they were bound to the land and could not legally move at other times of the year. Lords were limited to collecting the traditional rent and had no authority over the peasants. Ivan IV’s mad Oprichnina (1565–1572) was responsible for initiating changes in the status of the peasant. Ivan gave his special Oprichnina troops, the oprichniki, control over the peasants living on the lands they possessed, which allowed them to raise their rents to whatever level they pleased. As a result the oprichniki “collected as much rent in one year as previously had been collected in ten.” This and other barbarous acts of the Oprichnina resulted in the depopulation of much of old Muscovy as the peasants fled to newly annexed areas (colonial expansion). Certain landholders (pomestie) then successfully petitioned the government to repeal the peasants’ right to move on St. George’s Day. In 1592 this repeal was temporarily extended to all peasants. Thus serfdom became the temporary legal status of all peasants.

Whether there was serfdom of the third category in the early Mongol period, after the collapse of Russian princely power and during the period when the sole authority may have been the owner of a large estate (votchina) or manor, is an issue. While there may have technically been serfdom between 1237 and 1300 or 1350, the reality was certainly such that no peasant knew he was a serf. In those decades most peasants lived on land they considered their own, not on a manor. Moreover, given

Limitations were placed on the recovery of fugitive peasants in 1592, but they were repealed in the Law Code of 1649 (Ulozhenie). According to Chapter 11, Article 1, of the Ulozhenie of 1649, any peasants who had been recorded as living on state, court, or peasant taxable lands could be returned to those lands without any time limits. Article 2 stated the same for peasants living on seignorial lands. Thus all peasants in Russia within the reach of the Ulozhenie were serfs. The code also specified how runaways should be returned, and especially what should happen if male and female fugitives married. The Orthodox Church held that marriage was inviolable, so the couple had to be returned to the lord of one of them. The most ra-

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Serfs line up to draw water from a village well. © HULTON ARCHIVE

tional solution to this problem was that the lord who received a fugitive lost the couple, as punishment for having received the runaway. If the couple was on neutral territory, the contesting lords cast lots; the winner got the couple and paid the loser 10 rubles for the serf he had lost. The serf family was not inviolable, however, and under certain circumstances could be broken up. Other articles of the Ulozhenie established rules that led to the further abasement of the serfs, ultimately to a change in their status to something resembling slaves. It started with owners of hereditary estates, who were allowed to manumit their serfs (a practice ominously borrowed from slavery) and transfer them from one estate to another. This seemed innocent enough, as the state was primarily concerned about service landholdings and having the serfs there to support whichever cavalryman might be holding it at the moment. Both


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logical and juridical problems automatically arose when service landholdings were converted into hereditary estates in 1714. Prior to that time, however, it appears that the process of converting the serf from a peasant bound to the land to a peasant bound to the person of a lord was under way. Between the Ulozhenie and the introduction of the soul tax in 1721, the extent to which this had progressed is disputed. Some transactions appear to have been concealed sales of peasants, for example. After 1721, conditions worsened. Lords were held responsible for the collection of the soul tax, which putatively gave them additional power over the serfs. Then in 1762 lords were freed from twenty-five-year (essentially lifetime) compulsory military service, so that many of them spent most of their lives on their estates and took an interest in the management of those estates. This was the coup de grace, which often

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An illustration of serfs toiling in the field. © BETTMANN/CORBIS

converted seignorial serfdom into near slavery. Serfs were auctioned, traded, moved to wherever their lords wanted them to live, and even compelled to breed. However, lords did not own a serf’s inventory, clothing, personal property, and so on. These features increasingly distinguished seignorial serfs from serfs living on state and court lands, who came to be called “state peasants” even though they were still really serfs. Serfdom was abolished in stages, depending on which category peasants belonged to. In 1861 serfs serving in lords’ households (house serfs [dvorovye lyudi], nominally, and probably frequently literally, descendants of house slaves who had been put on the tax rolls in 1721) and possessional serfs (those assigned to work in factories, typically textile and metallurgical, whose output collapsed in 1861) were freed in all respects

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immediately. Seignorial serfs were immediately freed from landlord control (from being bound to the person of their lord) and were instead bound to the commune (i.e., to the land). This was done to avoid flooding the cities (officials knew the Manchester phenomenon) and to ensure stability (the same officials believed the commune was a stabilizing factor in the countryside). A separate emancipation freed the state serfs and peasants in 1863. Serfdom was finally abolished in 1906 and 1907, when communal control over the former seignorial peasants was abolished and they were allowed to move wherever they desired. Many peasants believed that serfdom was reinstituted when the Soviets collectivized agriculture at the end of the 1920s.

See also:

EMANCIPATION ACT; ENSERFMENT; LAW CODE

OF 1649; OPRICHNINA; PEASANTRY; SLAVERY


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Emmons, Terence. (1968). The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861. London: Cambridge University Press. Field, Daniel. (1976). The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hellie, Richard, ed. and tr. (1967 and 1970). Muscovite Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Syllabus Division. Hellie, Richard, editor and translator. (1988). The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher. Moon, David. (2001). The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1762–1907. New York: Longman. RICHARD HELLIE

S T .

The fractured Orthodox Church declined under renewed persecution in the 1930s but experienced rebirth during World War II. The day of the German invasion (June 22, 1941), Sergei issued a message asking all believers to rally to the defense of the nation. He subsequently encouraged large-scale offerings by Orthodox parishes for the war effort. In September 1943, Josef Stalin met with Sergei and two other metropolitans for the purpose of reestablishing the church’s national organization. That month, a council of bishops elected Sergei as patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. He served until his death on May 15, 1944.

See also:

LIVING CHURCH MOVEMENT; PATRIARCHATE;

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; TIKHON, PATRIARCH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curtiss, John S. (1952). The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917–1950. Boston: Little, Brown. Innokentii, Hegumen. (1993). “Metropolitan Sergii’s Declaration and Today’s Church.” Russian Studies in History 32(2):82–88. EDWARD E. ROSLOF

SERGEI, PATRIARCH (1867–1944), twelfth patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, 1943–1944. The son of a provincial priest, Ivan Nikolaevich Stragorodsky graduated from the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. He became the monk Sergei in 1890 and was consecrated bishop in 1901. He presided over the famous religious-philosophical seminars in St. Petersburg (1901–1903) before becoming archbishop of Finland (1905–1917). After 1917, he wielded great influence as a metropolitan while causing controversy with his willingness to seek political compromise. Sergei recognized the schismatic Living Church Movement in June 1922, although he later publicly repented to Patriarch Tikhon for this error in judgment. The Soviet government prevented election of a new patriarch when Tikhon died in 1925. Metropolitan Peter Poliansky served as the locum tenens (guardian of the patriarchate) and chose Sergei as his deputy. Sergei became de facto leader of the church after Peter’s arrest. Under pressure from the state and rival bishops, Sergei issued a declaration in July 1927 that proclaimed the church’s loyalty to the Soviet government and brought a temporary halt to religious persecution. Orthodox leaders in the USSR and abroad condemned Sergei’s declaration, however, and renounced his authority.


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SERGIUS, ST. (c. 1322–1392) Saist, founder of the Trinity monastery near Moscow, leader of a monastic revival, participant in political and ecclesiastical politics, and subject of a cult as intercessor for the Russian land. Information about Sergius’s early life and much of his later public career comes from the Life composed by Epifany “the Wise” in 1418 and revisions of it by Pakhomy “the Serb” from 1438 to 1459. Baptized Varfolomei, he was the second of three sons of a boyar family of Rostov. In 1327 and 1328 the Mongols devastated Rostov, ruining his family. In 1331 Prince Ivan I “Kalita” of Moscow annexed Rostov and resettled the family in Radonezh. Varfolomei’s brothers married, but he remained celibate. When his parents died, he and elder brother Stefan, a monk since the death of his wife, went to live as hermits in a nearby “wilderness” in 1342. They built a chapel, dedicated to the Trinity, and Varfolomei was tonsured as the monk Sergius. Stefan left for Moscow, where he met the future Metropolitan Alexei and became confessor to magnates at court. Sergius lived alone in poverty two years, sharing food with animals, tormented

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ably in 1377, at Metropolitan Alexei’s behest and blessed by Patriarch Philotheos of Constantinople, Sergius established a cenobite rule at Trinity modeled on the rule of the Studios Monastery in Constantinople. It mandated communal living and control of property supervised by an elected abbot. Some monks led by Stefan, who earlier had returned probably expecting to become Trinity’s first abbot, opposed this. Instead of resisting, Sergius left. This caused defections and appeals from other monks at Trinity to Metropolitan Alexei and Grand Prince Dmitry, who intervened to reaffirm a cenobite rule there and to restore Sergius as abbot. Sergius’s example inspired a wave of monastic foundings. He assisted in establishing six houses and, reportedly, four more. Biographies of at least seven other founders said their subjects were Sergius’s disciples or inspired by him. These houses became engines of agricultural, industrial, and commercial development, as well as spiritual centers, contributing to the economic and cultural integration of the Russian state. In 1422 Abbot Nikon instituted worship at Trinity of Sergius’s sanctity and probably originated the story related by Pakhomy that the Mother of God appeared to Sergius and put his house under her protection.

Icon of St. Sergius of Radonezh by Ivan Kholshevnikov. © REPRODUCED

BY PERMISSION OF THE

STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM, ST.

PETERSBURG, RUSSIA/CORBIS

by demons and the devil, an ordeal replicating narratives of hermit saints of early Christianity. He attracted twelve disciples and in 1353 acceded to their entreaties and became abbot. Sergius’s example of humility, manual labor, and disdain for material things attracted more monks and brought to his house the support of neighboring peasants and landowners. While Sergius lived a simple life, and he and his disciples sought an intense spirituality resembling that of Hesychast solitaries in Byzantium, there is no evidence that he knew or practiced formal Hesychast methods of prayer.

According to Pakhomy and later sources, Alexei and Grand Prince Dmitry wanted Sergius to be metropolitan upon Alexei’s death in 1378, but Sergius refused. In reality a metropolitan-designate named Kiprian, installed by Constantinople to assure the unity of the eparchy in Moscow and Lithuania, was waiting in Kiev. Also Dmitry and Alexei had a candidate, Dmitry’s confessor and former court official Mikhail (“Mityai”). Kiprian’s three letters to Sergius and his nephew Fyodor, requesting or acknowledging their assistance, and other evidence make clear that Sergius supported his candidacy, which eventually was successful. The letters cause some to argue that Sergius, like Fyodor, was Dmitry’s confessor.

Sergius became a historical person when a source other than his Life recorded that he founded a monastery at Serpukhov for Prince Vladimir Andreyevich and baptized Yuri, the second son of Grand Prince Dmitry I of Moscow, in 1374. Prob-

Sergius is most famous as intercessor for Dmitry’s Russian army that defeated the Mongols on Kulikovo Field near the Don River in 1380. It was the first Russian victory over the Mongols, and Sergius’s intercession was taken to mean that God favored Russia’s liberation from the Mongol yoke. Although the earliest text mentioning Sergius’s intercession is Pakhomy’s revision of Sergius’s Life in 1438, the episode became widely accepted, and Sergius was recognized throughout Russia as a saint at some point between 1448 and 1450. Thenceforth

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this episode was embellished many times in tales and histories and gave rise to legends of subsequent interventions by Sergius against Russia’s enemies. Sergius remains for many the personification of Russian exceptionalism. On July 29, 1385, Sergius baptized Dmitry’s son Pyotr. That same year Dmitry asked Sergius to reconcile him with Grand Prince Oleg of Ryazan and to compel Oleg to recognize Dmitry as his senior, a task he performed successfully. A story that Sergius similarly intervened for Moscow in 1365 in Nizhny Novgorod is probably apocryphal.

See also:

TRINITY ST. SERGIUS MONASTERY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fedotov, G. P. (1965). A Treasury of Russian Spirituality. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Fedotov, G. P. (1966). The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meyendorff, John. (1981). Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Miller, David B. (1993). “The Cult of Saint Sergius of Radonezh and Its Political Uses.” Slavic Review 52: 680–699. DAVID B. MILLER

SERVICE STATE The service state has been the major factor in the past half millennium of Russian history. It has saved Russia from foreign conquest by mobilizing and controlling at crucial moments the basic factors of the economy—land, labor, and capital. It has used major ideologies to legitimize itself and then has proceeded to try to control most areas of artistic and intellectual life. The service state has gone through three major phases which may be described as “service class revolutions” and serve as classic illustrations of path dependency. Each service class revolution has been a response by Russia’s rulers to perceptions of significant military threats from foreign adversaries. The first can be dated roughly to 1480, when Russia threw off the Mongol yoke. From then the independent state was on its own and faced foreign threats from various quarters, but the major one was from Lithuania, the largest state in Europe with holdings in Vyazma, about 100 miles (160


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kilometers) from Moscow. Moscow’s conquest of the Republic of Novgorod in 1478, the execution and deportation of its secular and religious elite, and the annexation of their vast lands created the opportunity for the creation of a service class, the backbone of the new service state. The Novgorodian lands were handed out as service landholdings (pomestie) to provincial cavalrymen for their maintenance. These cavalrymen had no independent base and were totally beholden to Moscow. They were ranked according to perceived service performance and compensated accordingly. In exchange for the pomestie, they had to serve Moscow for life. As Moscow annexed other territories, it converted them to pomestie tenure. In time, Moscow had a corps of 25,000 pomestie cavalrymen at its beck and call to confront any military emergency. This method of fielding an army was deemed so effective that in 1556 the government mobilized all seignorial land and required estate owners to provide the army with one fully equipped, outfitted cavalryman for each 100 cheti (1 chet ⫽ 11/3 acres) of populated land. In 1480 a master ideology was lacking to support the forming service state, but it did not take long for one to appear. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Joseph, the abbot of Volokolamsk Monastery, advanced the precept of Agapetos (fl. 527–548) that “in his person the ruler is a man, but in his authority he is like God.” This conflicted with the views of Grand Prince Ivan III, who wanted to annex all church lands and convert them into pomestie holdings; his son Basil III, who preferred to let the church continue to own a third of all the populated land of Russia; and other churchmen who believed that the church should not be so involved in “the world.” This variation on the divine right of kings gave the Russian ruler unquestioned control over everything. The idea reigned at least until 1905, probably until 1917. Such military might and autocratic pretensions needed financial means and bureaucratic coordination to support them. After 1300 the government apparatus was part of the Moscow ruler’s household, but around 1480 specialization began to develop in the grand princely household administration. Around 1550 special chancelleries with their own record-keeping apparatus began to develop to keep track of the service land fund, the provincial cavalry, the new infantry arquebusiers who had been created to complement the cavalry, and the taxes needed to support these activities. By

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the mid-seventeenth century there were about forty of these chancelleries, which seemingly were as efficient and professional as any similar, contemporary organs on Earth. The last element in the construction of the service state was the inclusion of the masses. To support the cavalry, the peasantry was definitively enserfed between the 1580s and 1649. In an attempt to ensure the stability of the government’s cash receipts, the townsmen were bound to their urban places of residence and granted monopolies on trade and industry and the right to own urban property. By 1650 the service state was fully formed. Its completion had been forced by the June 1648 Moscow rebellion against the corrupt regime of Boris Morozov, which compelled the government to convoke the Assembly of the Land, whose product was the Law Code of 1649. During the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667), the old military service class’s obsolescence was revealed, and it was replaced by new formation regiments commanded by foreign officers. Yet the old landed service class retained its privileges and its monopolies over much of the country’s land and peasant labor. This proved to be the trajectory of all service classes: creation, hegemony, decline, and obsolescence—yet retaining all privileges. The second service class revolution was the product of Peter the Great’s perception that Sweden’s Charles XII desired to annex Russia. After losing to Charles at Narva in 1700, Peter completely revitalized the service state. All the surviving military servicemen were put back in harness, the dependency of the serfs on the landowners was strengthened, the army was reformed, the Table of Ranks of 1721 told the service state’s agents where they belonged in the merit-based hierarchy, and the government apparatus was reformed. The Orthodox Church, which had been created by the state in 988 and was nearly always the state’s obedient servant, was converted into a department of the state government with the creation of the Holy Synod in 1721. This continued the secularization of the church administration that had been introduced in 1649 but had been halted when Tsar Alexei died in 1676. Alexei’s son Peter made the clergy more active members of the service state by requiring them to report to the police what they heard in confessions as well as to read government edicts to the populace from the pulpit.

long as he performed the duties demanded of him. This was absolutely crucial in holding together an ever-expanding multinational empire. Peter articulated this in comments about his foreign minister, Pyotr Shafirov, a Jew, and other Jewish people in his administration: “I could not care less whether a man is baptized or circumcised, only that he knows his business and he distinguishes himself by probity.” In the perfectly operating service state, there was no place for nationalism (such as Russification) or persecution of national minorities or alien religions (e.g., Jews). Those occurred only at times when the service state was in decline. The Petrine service state was very successful in defeating Sweden and putting Russia’s other major adversaries—the Rzeczpospolita and the Crimean Khanate—on the defensive and ultimately exterminating them. These successes lessened the demands on the service state, and in 1762 Peter III freed the gentry land- and serf-owners from compulsory military service. Need for revenue forced most younger gentry to render military service anyway. The other major personnel segment of the service state, the peasantry, was not freed in 1762, and the condition of the seignorial serfs was abased to the extent that they became akin to slaves by 1800. Defeat during the Crimean War (1853–1856) did not provoke Russia to initiate another service class revolution, although a dozen major reforms were enacted between 1861 and 1874. In 1861 all seignorial serfs were freed from slavelike dependency on their owners, but were bound instead to their communes and were allowed to move freely only in 1906. This largely ended the second service class revolution, although the autocratic monarchy persisted until February 1917.

Peter articulated one of the basic principles of the service state: anyone was eligible to serve, as

Certain features of the service state did not die in 1762, 1861, or even 1906. The government maintained its pretensions to control all higher culture by censoring literature, the theater, all art exhibitions, and musical performances. Secret police surveillance was continuously strengthened as the government used repression, jailing, and exile in its attempts to cope with the rising revolutionary movement opposed to the autocracy and serfdom. The industrialization of Russia launched by Minister of Finance Sergei Witte during the 1890s was a demonstration of service state power reminiscent of Peter I and anticipating Josef Stalin.

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The October Revolution abolished Christianity and the Agapetos formula as the regime’s ideology. The Bolsheviks replaced it with Marxist-Leninist dialectical historical materialism. Stalin, sensing a threat from the United Kingdom in 1927, used the new ideology to legitimize his launching of the third service class revolution in 1928. The Soviet service state proved unable to manage the economy efficiently, but the service class remained during the Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982), Yuri Andropov (1982–1984), and Konstantin Chernenko (1984–1985) years. The Soviet service class had already begun to generate into a privileged elite (what Milovan Djilas termed “the new class”) by the end of the 1930s, and this degeneration had turned into a rout by 1985. By the middle of the 1970s “the working class pretended to work and the state pretended to pay them.” The general trend was for people to go to work to socialize with their friends, not to produce anything. By the time of the coup of August 19, 1991, attempting to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, the privileged elite (the “nomenklatura”) rode around in their own private motorcars and went straight to the head of long lines for ordinary consumer goods such as newspapers and magazines while getting most of their goods from closed stores open only to the privileged elite. It was obvious that the Soviet service state was no longer working, could not make the economy grow or improve the lives of its subjects, and was little more than a debauchery of corruption. Gorbachev, another believer in socialism, tried to reform the system, but it proved impossible. The service state lost its teeth when he repealed Article 6 of the Brezhnev constitution, which had given the Communist Party a monopoly on Soviet political life. The Communist Party had also assumed a monopoly on all elite positions, so that one had to be a member of the CPSU to hold many jobs. That had not been true during the times of Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. This change was another sign of the degeneration of the service state under Brezhnev. When Gorbachev delivered the coup de grace to the Soviet service state, no one wept. The service state was a major Russian “contribution” to the human experience. Whether there ever will be a fourth service class revolution remains to be seen.

See also:

ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; ECONOMY,

TSARIST; INDUSTRIALIZATION; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SERFDOM


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hellie, Richard. (1987). “What Happened? How Did He Get Away with It? Ivan Groznyi’s Paranoia and the Problem of Institutional Restraints.” Russian History 14:199–224. Hellie, Richard. (2002). “The Role of the State in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy.” In Modernizing Muscovy, ed. J. T. Kotilaine and Marshall T. Poe. Leiden: Brill. Kliuchevskii, V. O. (1960). A History of Russia. 5 vols., tr. C. J. Hogarth. New York: Russell & Russell. Swianiewicz, Stanislaw. (1965). Forced Labor and Economic Development: An Enquiry into the Experience of Soviet Industrialization. London: Oxford University Press. Tucker, Robert C. (1990). Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941. New York: Norton. Voslensky, Michael. (1984). Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class, tr. Eric Mosbacher. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. RICHARD HELLIE

SEVASTOPOL City and naval base on the southwestern tip of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine. With its excellent harbors and anchorages, Sevastopol has an advantageous location from which to conduct operations in the Black Sea. The city stands on the southern shore of Sevastopol Bay and has a population of 390,000—75 percent Russian and 20 percent Ukrainian. The site of ancient settlements, modern Sevastopol was founded by Prince Grigory Potemkin in 1783 after the conquest of the Crimean Khanate. Admiral F.F. Mekenzy, commander of the newly created Black Sea Fleet, placed a naval station there, and in 1784 the settlement was named Sevastopol. In 1804 Alexander I’s government declared Sevastopol the primary naval base of the Black Sea Fleet. The naval base and the city grew significantly during the second quarter of the nineteenth century when Admiral Mikhail Lazarev served as fleet commander. By 1844 the city had a population of more than forty thousand, making it the largest city in Crimea. Sevastopol became the major base for fitting out and repairing warships. Its defenses grew in extent and quality. In 1853 Admiral Pavel Nakhimov’s squadron sailed from there to Sinope, where it annihilated a

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Turkish squadron. During the Crimean War, Anglo-French forces besieged Sevastopol. The defense was immortalized by Leo Tolstoy, one of the defenders, in his Sevastopol Tales. Sevastopol fell to the Anglo-French forces in September 1855. Following the Crimean War, Sevastopol suffered decline, because the peace treaty denied Russia the right to maintain a fleet in the Black Sea. With the remilitarization of the Black Sea after 1870 Sevastopol regained its importance as a naval base for a modern ironclad fleet. Sevastopol was associated with rebellion, mutiny, and civil war. In 1830 government restrictions to combat a cholera epidemic set off a revolt among sailors and civilians. In June 1905 the battleship Potemkin sailed from Sevastopol on its way to mutiny over bad meat. During the Russian civil war Sevastopol was the headquarters of Baron Peter Wrangel’s White Army. The Red Army under Mikhail Frunze stormed Crimea in October 1920, and Wrangel evacuated his army to Istanbul. During World War II Sevastopol was the site of an eight-month siege by German and Rumanian forces under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and fell in July 1942. On May 9, 1944, the Soviet Fourth Ukrainian Front under the command of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin liberated the city. Following the end of the existence of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia and Ukraine entered into negotiations over Sevastopol. During the early twenty-first century the city is a special region within Ukraine, not under the government of Crimea, and the Russian and Ukrainian navies share the naval base.

See also:

feasible, leaving the country without a perspective plan for the first time in three decades. In one of his many reorganizations, Khrushchev substituted a Seven-Year Plan to run from 1959 to 1965. It included his new priorities for a much larger chemical industry, more housing, substitution of oil and gas for coal in the production of electricity and for powering the railroads, and more emphasis on agriculture, especially in the eastern areas. Planned targets for 1965 were ambitious, and some were even raised in October 1961. Despite considerable growth of housing construction, meat production, and consumer durables, fulfillment was not achieved in many areas. Khrushchev had grand hopes for the chemical industry and agriculture, but the targets for mineral fertilizers, synthetic fibers, and the grain harvest were all missed. Civilian investment rates fell, and national income (defined in Marxist concepts) was underfulfilled by four to seven percent. Gross production volume of producers goods did exceed the long-term plan, with an index (1959⫽100) of 196 achieved versus 185–188 planned, while consumer goods fell below it, 160 actual versus 162–165 planned. The shortfalls can perhaps be explained by the strain of increased expenditures on space and military ventures in these years and the complexity of planning for more tasks. The continual sovnarkhoz (regional economic council) reorganizations, which put considerable strain on Gosplan to coordinate supplies, probably also had a negative impact on overall results.

See also:

FIVE-YEAR PLANS; GOSPLAN

BLACK SEA FLEET; CRIMEA; CRIMEAN WAR;

UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS; WHITE ARMY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nove, Alec. (1969). An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. London: Allen Lane.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curtiss, John Shelton. (1979). Russia’s Crimean War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

MARTIN C. SPECHLER

Tolstoy, Leo. (1961). Sebastopol. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. JACOB W. KIPP

SEVEN YEARS’ WAR

Following the rise of Nikita Khrushchev to primacy among the leaders of the Soviet Union, the sixth five-year plan (1956–1960) was abandoned as in-

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) involved nearly every European state and was watershed in world history. It arose as a result of the Anglo-French colonial rivalry and because of the growing might of Prussia in central Europe, which threatened the interests of Austria, France, and Russia. The out-

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come ensured that England became the dominant power in North America, and the war consolidated the growing power and prestige of Frederick the Great’s Prussia. For this, he could thank Russia and its bizarre participation in the war. Internally, Russian actions in the Seven Years’ War also brought about a palace coup and the subsequent rule of Catherine II. Prussia had emerged as a potential European power by the middle of the eighteenth century. Under Frederick II (r. 1740–1786), Prussian policies became increasingly ambitious. Frederick wanted to consolidate his power and territories gained at the expense of Austria during the 1840s. Austria, for its part, desired a return of territories such as Silesia. Russia and France also worried over Prussian power and potential incursions near their respective borders. When war broke out between France and England over their North American territories, Prussia signed an alliance with England in January 1756. The alliance brought a rapprochement between France and Austria. By the end of 1756, Russia signed a new alliance with its traditional ally, Austria. The sides had been drawn. After war broke out in 1756 on the continent, Frederick’s forces enjoyed success against the Austrians. By April 1756 the Prussians reached Prague. In the Bohemian capital the Austrians rallied, and Frederick’s forces retreated. At that point Austria’s allies, including Russia, entered the conflict. Despite the numbers stacked against him, Frederick continued to win surprising victories, and 1757 established his reputation as a brilliant commander. The following year brought mixed results and mounting casualties for the Russians, who lost twelve thousand troops at August’s Battle of Zorndorf. In 1759 the allies, and particularly Russia, ratcheted up the pressure. Led by General Pyotr Saltykov, the Russian army occupied Frankfurt in June 1759. By 1760 Frederick had only half the numbers of his Russian and Austrian opponents, who began to close the circle against Frederick. Russian commanders in particular focused on Berlin, and even occupied the Prussian capital for three days in September and October 1760. Exhausted by the continuous marching demanded of eighteenth-century warfare, the two sides fought no serious battles for the rest of 1760 and most of 1761. Frederick’s situation, however, was grave. Russia and Austria could count on more soldiers and supplies, and Prussia was cut off from Silesia, a major supplier of food.


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Then the situation changed dramatically. On January 5, 1762, the Empress Elizabeth died. Her successor, Peter III, was a fervent admirer of Frederick II and all things Prussian. When he took the throne, Peter ended the war with Prussia, called his troops back, and returned all territorial gains. As a result, Frederick recovered and defeated the Austrians. France, defeated in North America and more disinterested about the continental war, also signed a treaty with Prussia. Frederick’s “miracle” had resulted from Russia’s flip-flop, and his victory brought the first step toward Prussian domination of Germany. At home, Peter III’s decision ran counter to Russia’s strategic and political interests. Contemporaries called the conflict the “Prussian War,” and even popular prints of the time depicted the war as a struggle solely between Russia and Prussia. The decision to hand Frederick victory thus did not go over well within any segment of the population. Catherine, Peter’s German wife, led a palace coup against her husband that toppled him from power on July 9, 1762. Catherine II’s rise to power would have been inconceivable had it not been for Russia’s participation in the war.

See also:

AUSTRIA, RELATIONS WITH; CATHERINE II; ELIZ-

ABETH; FRANCE, RELATIONS WITH; PETER III; PRUSSIA, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Fred. (2001). Crucible of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Vintage. Keep, John L. H. (2002). “The Russian Army in the Seven Years’ War.” In The Military and Society in Russia, 1450–1917, ed. Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe. Leiden: Brill. Leonard, Carol. (1993). Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. STEPHEN M. NORRIS

SHAHUMIAN, STEPAN GEORGIEVICH (1878–1918), Bolshevik party activist and theorist on the nationality question; principal leader of the Bolsheviks in Baku during the Russian Revolution who perished as one of the famous Twenty-Six Baku Commissars. Born into an Armenian family in Tiflis (Tbilisi), the young Shahumian was educated in local

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schools before entering the Riga Polytechnic Institute in 1900. Active in Armenian student political circles, he turned toward Marxism in Riga. Expelled for his political activities, Shahumian continued his studies at the University of Berlin, where he joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP). He grew close to Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, translated the Communist Manifesto into Armenian, and was elected a delegate to the Fourth (Stockholm) and Fifth (London) Congresses of the RSDRP. Shahumian was active in the strike movement in Baku during the first Russian revolution (1905–1907) and throughout the years of reaction and repression of the labor movement, and was arrested and imprisoned several times. When the February Revolution broke out, he returned from exile in Astrakhan and assumed leadership of the Baku Bolsheviks. Elected chairman of the Baku Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, Shahumian was the most important figure in Baku politics in 1917 and 1918. After the October Revolution, Lenin’s government appointed him Extraordinary Commissar for the Affairs of the Caucasus. Shahumian headed the Council of People’s Commissars, the de facto government of the Baku Commune, from April through July 1918. Although he was moderate in temperament and tolerant of diverse political parties, his brief tenure was marked by a brash attempt to expand Soviet power throughout the Caucasus by military means. As the Turkish army approached Baku, the soviet voted to invite Persiabased British forces to defend the city. Shahumian’s government stepped down and soon was arrested. On September 20, 1918, anti-Bolsheviks brutally executed twenty-six commissars, among them Shahumian, in the deserts of Transcaspia (now Turkmenistan). The Soviet government blamed the British for their deaths and commemorated them as martyrs to the revolution. Reburied in a mass grave in Baku, they became the inspiration for paintings, songs, poems, and films. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, anticommunist Azerbaijanis disinterred their corpses and destroyed their monuments.

See also: ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; BAKU; BOLSHEVISM; CAUCASUS; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1972). The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

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SHAKHRAI, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH (b. 1956), lawyer and former minister of nationalities. Sergei Shakhrai trained as a lawyer at Rostov State University and attained the rank of candidate of juridical sciences from Moscow State University (MGU) in 1982. He then taught law at MGU until 1990. Shakhrai was a Party member from 1988 to August 1991. In 1990, Shakhrai was elected to the new RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies, where he quickly became chair of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Committee for Legislation. He simultaneously served Boris Yeltsin as a counselor for legal and nationalities affairs. In 1992 he was named a member of the Russian Federation Security Council and deputy chair responsible for nationality issues. During the November–December 1992 ethnic unrest in North Ossetia and Ingushetia, Shakhrai served as head of the temporary regional administration. A Terek Cossack, he also chaired the Russian parliamentary committee on the rehabilitation of the Cossacks. In November 1992, Shakhrai was appointed a deputy prime minister. In legal matters, Shakhrai argued Yeltsin’s case in the 1992 Constitutional Court hearings on the legality of the president’s banning of the CPSU, a decree written by Shakhrai himself. He also served as Yeltsin’s representative to the 1993 Duma commission drafting a new Russian constitution and negotiated many of the subsequent federal powersharing treaties. Shakhrai became leader of the Party of Russian Unity and Accord in October 1993, running on their ticket in the December 1993 Duma election. However, he resigned from the party when the party joined the Our Home is Russia movement in August 1995. Shakhrai was transferred from deputy prime minister to minister of nationalities and regional policy in January 1994. This move was soon overturned; by April he was reappointed deputy prime minister and in May removed as minister of nationalities. However, he continued to influence the decisions of his replacement, Nikolai Yegorov. Shakhrai’s work in law and nationality affairs combined in the issue of Chechnya. Despite Chechen president Dzhokar Dudayev’s assertions otherwise, Shakhrai insisted that Chechnya remained an integral part of the Russian Federation. When Dudayev refused to ratify the new constitution, despite Shakhrai’s repeated attempts at negotiation, he


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provided the legal pretext for an invasion. Shakhrai and minister of defense Pavel Grachev convinced Yeltsin that an attack on Chechnya would be quick and painless; ultimately, the attack was launched in December 1994. Shakhrai’s prediction proved false, however, as the first Russo-Chechen war lasted until August 1996. Yeltsin summarily fired Shakhrai in June 1998, when the lawyer questioned the constitutionality of a possible third term as president for Yeltsin. However, Shakhrai was not unemployed for long. In October, prime minister Yevgeny Primakov appointed Shakhrai as his own legal advisor. Shakhrai also won a Duma seat for Perm oblast during the 1999 election. As of 2003 he was a member of the influential Russian Foreign and Defense Policy Council and was teaching at Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO).

See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; PARTY OF RUSSIAN UNITY AND ACCORD

T R I A L

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Dunlop, John B. (1998). Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lieven, Anatol. (1998). Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven: Yale University Press. ANN E. ROBERTSON

SHAKHTY TRIAL This famous trial based on fabricated charges was used by Stalin to start a three-year attack on the technical intelligentsia of the USSR and to discredit moderates within the political leadership. Fiftythree mining engineers and technicians, including some top officials and three German engineers, were accused of acts of sabotage and treason dating back to the 1920s and taking part in a conspiracy directed from abroad (involving French

Courtroom scene from the Shakhty sabotage trial in 1928. © TASS/SOVFOTO


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finance and Polish counterespionage). The story of conspiracy was fabricated by the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) officials in the North Caucasus mining district known as the Donbass and focused on such acts as wasting capital, lowering the quality of production, raising its costs, mistreating workers, and other forms of “wrecking.” Held in a large auditorium at the House of Trade-Unions in Moscow, this six-week-long trial was arranged for maximum publicity, with movie cameras, a hundred journalists in attendance, and a different public audience each day. The presiding judge over the specially organized judicial presence was Andrei Vyshinsky, famous for his appearance as prosecutor at the major show trials of the 1930s; the prosecutor at the Shakhty trial was the Bolshevik jurist Nikolai Krylenko. For evidence, the prosecution relied on confessions of the accused, but twenty-three of the defendants proclaimed their innocence, and a few others retracted their confessions at trial. As a political show trial Shakhty was imperfect. Still, all but four of the accused were convicted, and five of them executed. In the wake of the Shakhty trial, non-Marxist engineers and technicians were placed on the defensive and many fell victim to persecution. “Specialist baiting” ranged from verbal harassment to firing from jobs, not to speak of arrests and convictions in later trials, including the well-known “Industrial Party” case. By 1931, when Stalin called a halt to the anti-specialist campaign, Soviet engineers had been tamed and any nascent threat of technocracy defeated. On the political level, the Shakhty trial served Stalin as a vehicle for radicalizing economic policy and sending a message of warning to moderates in the leadership (such as Alexei Rykov and Nikolai Bukharin). If nothing else, the persecution of the “bourgeois specialists” weakened one of the constituencies that supported a relatively cautious and moderate approach to industrialization. With hindsight it is clear that the Shakhty trial, along with the renewal of forced grain procurements, signaled the coming end of the class-conciliatory New Economic Policy and the start of a new period of class war that would culminate in the forced collectivization from 1929 to 1933. An important manifestation of the new class war was the Cultural Revolution from 1928 to 1931, in which young communists in many fields of art, science, and professional life were encouraged to attack and supplant their non-Marxist senior colleagues.

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SHOW TRIALS; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailes, Kendall. (1978). Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1978). “Cultural Revolution as Class War.” In Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kuromiya, Hiroaki. (1997). “The Shakhty Affair.” South East European Monitor 4(2):41–64. PETER H. SOLOMON JR.

SHAMIL (1797–1871), the most famous and successful antiRussian Islamic resistance leader during the nineteenth century; lionized by Chechen and Dagestani nationalists and co-opted by Russian literature and the public consciousness as a sign of tsarist imperial expansion and the Russian mission in Asia. Born in Gimri, modern Dagestan, Shamil demonstrated an early skill with weapons and horses. He entered a madrassah where he learned grammar, logic, rhetoric, and Arabic. There he joined the Murids, of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi Sufi order, in 1830. Following the transfer of Dagestan from Persia to the Russian Empire, Murids initiated a jihad against Russia under the leadership of Shamil’s mentor, the first imam of Dagestan, Ghazi Muhammed. After his death and the brief leadership of Hamza Bek, Shamil became the third imam of Dagestan and declared it an independent state in 1834. His personal charisma, political acumen, state building, and military ability as well as his blending of an egalitarian interpretation of Shari’a (Islamic Law) with proclamations of jihad against the Russian advance made him a popular political and religious leader (even among the non-Muslims of the North Caucasus). For twenty-five years (1834–1859), Shamil led raids on Russian positions in the Caucasus. He reached the peak of prestige in 1845 devastating the advance of Mikhail Vorontsov, who organized an army to complete the final conquest of the Caucasus. In these years of struggle, Shamil unified the disparate communities of the North Caucasus, built a state, organized a regular army, and completed the Islamicization of Dagestan and Chechnya. In


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1857, the Russian Empire took a more aggressive stance; Generals Alexander Baryatinsky and Nikolai Evdokimov overwhelmed the weaker and exhausted forces of Shamil. By April 1859 his fortress at Vedeno fell and Shamil retreated to Mount Gunib. On September 6, 1859, Shamil surrendered to the Russians and the resistance movement never recovered. He was taken to St. Petersburg for an audience with Tsar Alexander II, paraded around Russia as a hero and menace, and then exiled to Kaluga. In March 1871 he died and was buried in Medina. Drawing from the rich literary tradition of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Shamil emerged as a Caucasian hero of Russian Romanticism and a symbol of Russian expansion and its civilizing mission. Shamil was an international celebrity; his exploits serialized in numerous languages. Soviet historians initially lauded Shamil as a hero of a national liberation movement against tsarist imperialism; this became problematic when his name was linked with anti-Russian and anti-Bolshevik opposition. Thus, Shamil was depicted by Soviet historians during the second half of the twentieth century as personally progressive while his movement was corrupted by anti-popular and religious elements.

See also: CAUCASUS; ISLAM; NATIONALISM IN THE TSARIST PERIOD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gammer, Moshe. (1994). Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan. London: Frank Cass.

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planner or intelligence officer. He next served on the Worker’s and Peasants’ Red Army (RKKA) staff, then from 1925 to 1928 commanded the Leningrad and Moscow military districts. From 1928 to 1931 he was RKKA chief of staff, followed by a tour as commander of the Volga Military District. From 1933 to 1935 he headed the Frunze Military Academy, after which he commanded the Leningrad Military District. From 1937 to 1940 he served as second chief of the newly created Red Army General Staff, followed by appointment after the Winter War (1939–1940) as deputy Defense Commissar. At the end of July 1941, despite ill health, he replaced Georgy Zhukov to serve as chief of the General Staff until May 1942. While recovering from either nervous exhaustion or malaria, he reverted to assignment as deputy defense commissar, followed in 1943–1945 by tenure as chief of the Academy of the General Staff. An officer of intellect and experience, Shaposhnikov left his mark on nearly every important military organizational and doctrinal innovation of the 1920s and 1930s. His most important scholarly work was Brain of the Army (published in three volumes, 1927–1929), in which he studied the Austrian model of Conrad von Hoetzendorf and the tsarist experience in 1914 to argue for the creation of a modern Soviet general staff headed by an “integrated great captain.” The consummate general staff officer, Shaposhnikov was one of the few officers who enjoyed Josef Stalin’s open respect, and nearly every subsequent chief of the Red Army/Soviet General Staff considered himself Shaposhnikov’s disciple.

See also:

MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET

MICHAEL ROULAND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Erickson, John. (1962). The Soviet High Command. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

SHAPOSHNIKOV, BORIS MIKHAILOVICH

BRUCE W. MENNING

(1882–1945), marshal (1940), general staff officer, military theorist, and chief of the Red Army General Staff. Originally a career officer in tsarist service, Shaposhnikov graduated in 1910 from the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, then served in Turkestan, where he possibly contracted malaria, and in the Warsaw Military District. He attained regimental command during World War I, joined the Red Army in 1918, and occupied high staff positions during the Russian civil war, usually as


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SHATALIN, STANISLAV SERGEYEVICH (1934–1997), Soviet economist; advocate of decentralization and market reforms. Born in a family of upper-level functionaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Stanislav Shatalin graduated from the economics department of the Moscow State University and

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entered academia in the era of the Thaw. In 1965 he joined an influential school of economists at the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute (TsEMI) who were developing and advocating the System of Optimal Functioning for the Economy (SOFE) based on mathematical modeling. He shared the highest-ranking State Award, served as deputy director of the All-Union Institute for Systems Studies and director of the Institute for Economic Forecasting that had separated from TsEMI, and became full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1987. In 1989 and 1990, he emerged as a key advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and a rival to the government economic team of Leonid Abalkin, and was appointed to the Presidential Council. He coauthored the Five-Hundred-Day Plan, a reform program that was eventually declined by Gorbachev, partly because of its emphasis on the decentralization of the Union, but was widely acclaimed in the West. This program contained, albeit in a different sequence, the essential elements of the subsequent reforms of the 1990s (although some argue that the five hundred days was more gradual and mindful of the social consequences of drastic deregulation). After briefly taking part in liberal politics, Shatalin established and chaired the Reforma Foundation. His twilight years were overshadowed by the Audit Chamber’s inquiry into a mutually profitable relationship between a bank affiliated with his foundation and government managers of social security funds.

See also:

FIVE-HUNDRED-DAY PLAN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hough, Jerry F. (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Shatalin, S.; Petrakov, N.; Aleksashenko, S.; Yavlinsky, G.; and Fedorov, B. (1991). 500 Days: Transition to the Market. New York: St. Martin’s Press. DMITRI GLINSKI

SHCHARANSKY, ANATOLY NIKOLAYEVICH (b. 1948), prominent Jewish dissident. Anatoly Shcharansky was arrested on March 15, 1977, after being denied permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union. A twenty-nine-year-

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old computer expert at the time, Shcharansky had been a leading figure in the Helsinki Group, the oldest human rights organization in the Soviet Union, founded by Yuri F. Orlov on May 12, 1976, for the purpose of upholding the USSR’s responsibility to implement the Helsinki commitments. The Helsinki Agreement had been promulgated a year earlier (August 1975), its text published in full in both Pravda and Izvestia. The formation of the Moscow Helsinki Group sparked the creation of several human rights organizations throughout the Soviet Union. Shcharansky was a founding member of the group, along with Yelena Bonner (Andrei Sakharov’s wife), Anatoly Marchenko, Ludmilla M. Alexeyeva, and others. In the first three years of the group’s work, nearly all of its members were arrested or sentenced to psychiatric hospitalization as a way to repress their activities. Shcharansky’s arrest was part of a Soviet campaign against dissidents begun in February 1977. Others were arrested before him: Alexander Ginsburg (February 4), Ukrainian dissidents Mikola Rudenko and Olexy Tikhy (February 7), and Yuri Orlov (February 10). In June 1977, Shcharansky was charged with treason, specifically with accepting CIA funds to create dissension in the Soviet Union. After a perfunctory trial, he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was finally released in February 1986, when he and four other prisoners were exchanged for four Soviet spies who had been held in the West. Shcharansky finally emigrated to Israel, where he first changed his name to Natan Shcharan before settling on Natan Shcharansky. He is active in Israeli politics.

See also:

JEWS; REFUSENIKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilbert, Martin. (1986). Shcharansky, Hero of Our Time. New York: Viking. Goldberg, Paul. (1988). The Final Act: The Dramatic, Revealing Story of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group. New York: Morrow. Shcharansky, Anatoly; Bonner, Elena; and Alekseeva, Liudmilla. (1986). The Tenth Year of The Watch. New York: Ellsworth. Shcharansky, Anatoly, and Hoffman, Stefani. (1998). Fear No Evil: The Classic Memoir of One Man’s Triumph Over a Police State. New York: Public Affairs. JOHANNA GRANVILLE


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SHCHERBATOV, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH

(1788–1863), an actor from the serf estate who revolutionized acting styles with his realistic portrayals.

(1733–1790), historian, publicist, and government servitor.

Born in Ukraine into a family owned by Count G. S. Volkenshtein, the young Mikhail Shchepkin began performing in the private theater maintained on the estate. Indeed, many nobles used their serfs’ skills for entertainment, and Shchepkin represented an important source of talent for the professional stage. Especially gifted, by 1800 he was allowed to participate in amateur productions in nearby Kursk. Though still a serf, he joined several provincial touring companies as he rose to stardom. Finally, in 1822, one of his noble fans, Prince N. G. Repin, persuaded his owner to free him. Later that year Shchepkin made his debut in Moscow, and in 1824 he began his legendary rule at the imperial Maly Theater, where he dominated in comedy and drama, including William Shakespeare’s corpus, for the next forty years. From his theatrical base in Moscow, he also toured the provinces and appeared on St. Petersburg’s imperial stage. Shchepkin’s artistic significance lies in his influence over the transformation of acting styles, developing multi-dimensional characters instead of simulating the single stereotype. His breakthrough came in 1830, in his characterization of the fatuous Muscovite nobleman Famusov in Alexander Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit. Six years later, Shchepkin’s rendition of Khlestakov, the petty bureaucrat mistakenly identified by corrupt provincial officials as one of the tsar’s investigators in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, assured the move toward realism. His great talent, and popularity on stage, gave him access to Russia’s highest literary circles, where he helped novelist Ivan Turgenev write for the stage. Ironically, though, he surrendered his place at center stage when he refused to modify his style to accommodate the next level of realism, plays written in colloquialisms by Russia’s historically most popular playwright Alexander Ostrovsky from the 1860s.

See also:

Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov was a scion of one of Russia’s oldest families of the nobility. His father-in-law, Prince Ivan Shcherbatov (1696–1761), was Russian minister to the court of St. James from 1739 to 1742, and from 1743 to1746. Upon retirement from military service in 1762 following Peter III’s Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility, Mikhail Shcherbatov went on to serve as a deputy to Catherine II’s Legislative Commission (1766–1767), and then as Russia’s official historiographer, beginning in 1768. Shcherbatov is perhaps best known for his publication On the Corruption of Morals in Russia (O Povrezhdenii Nravov v Rossii), in which he criticizes Peter the Great’s introduction of the Table of Ranks (1722). He argued that the rank system reduced the prestige of the old nobility and allowed the rise of a mediocre and materialistic class of servitors. “By the regulations of the military service, which Peter the Great had newly introduced,” he wrote, “the peasants began with their masters at the same stage as soldiers of the rank and file: It was not uncommon for the peasants, by the law of seniority, to reach the grade of officer long before their masters, whom, as their inferiors, they frequently beat with sticks. Noble families were so scattered in the service that often one did not come again in contact with his relatives during his whole lifetime.” Shcherbatov believed in the innate inequality of human beings and genetic superiority of the noble aristocracy. He lamented the decline of the pre-Petrine nobility’s influence during the eighteenth century, because he did not believe one could achieve the genetic superiority of the latter by meritorious service alone. While he did advocate a constitutional form of government, he urged that Russia be ruled by a hereditary monarch, who would be constrained only by a constitution and checked only by a Senate composed of the old nobility with extensive financial, judicial, and executive powers.

See also:

KULTURNOST; TABLE OF RANKS

THEATER BIBLIOGRAPHY

Senelick, Laurence. (1984). Serf Actor: The Life and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Cross, A. G., and Smith, G. S., eds. (1994). Literature, Lives, and Legality in Catherine’s Russia. Cotgrave, Nottingham, UK: Astra Press.

LOUISE MCREYNOLDS

JOHANNA GRANVILLE

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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SHEVARDNADZE, EDUARD AMVROSIEVICH (b. 1928), foreign minister coincident with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Eduard Shevardhadze was minister of internal affairs of the Georgian Republic from 1965 to 1972, first secretary of the republic from 1972 to 1985, foreign minister of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1990 and again in 1991, and president of the Republic of Georgia from 1992 onward. Until 1985, Eduard Shevardnadze’s career had been entirely within the Soviet republic of Georgia. The character traits he brought with him from Georgia would serve him well during his years as foreign minister. He was a man of considerable vi-

sion, with a strong sense of purpose. He was also a superb politician—opportunistic, flexible, pragmatic, and ruthless. He was a natural actor, as every great politician must be, and he was a man of action, a problem-solver impatient with obstacles, and a brutal political infighter. Perhaps most important, he was a Georgian with cosmopolitan leanings, not a Russian who distrusted the West. Shevardnadze used the available instruments of power to advance his career and further his policy objectives in Georgia at the outset of his career. He repressed dissidents and removed real and potential opponents. An outstanding Soviet apparatchik, he acted the role of sycophant to the leaders of the Soviet Union, extolling the virtues of those in a position to help him. But he brought to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow a commitment to radical change, a willingness to implement reform in an unorthodox manner, and the political skills and strength to accomplish his goals. When Shevardnadze was appointed foreign minister of the Soviet Union in 1985, it was widely assumed that he would be little more than a mouthpiece for Mikhail Gorbachev, who would conduct his own foreign policy. In turning to a regional party leader with no foreign-policy background, however, Gorbachev was relying on personal instinct and political acumen. As party leader in Georgia during the 1970s and early 1980s, Shevardnadze battled corruption and introduced the most liberal political and economic reforms of any Soviet regional leader. Gorbachev’s long association with Shevardnadze was rooted in shared frustration with the inefficiencies and corruption of the communist system, and he believed that his friend had the understanding and political skills necessary to formulate and implement a new foreign policy.

As foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze implemented Gorbachev’s “new thinking” in international relations. ARCHIVE PHOTOS, INC. REPRODUCED

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Shevardnadze played a critical role in conceptualizing and implementing the Soviet Union’s dramatic about-face during the 1980s. Considered the moral force behind “new political thinking” in the former Soviet Union, Shevardnadze was the point man in the struggle to undermine the forces of inertia at home and to end Moscow’s isolation abroad. Two U.S. secretaries of state, George Shultz and James Baker, have credited him with convincing them that Moscow was committed to serious negotiations with the United States. Each became a proponent of reconciliation in administrations that were intensely anti-Soviet; each concluded that the history of Soviet-U.S. relations and the end of the Cold War would have been far different had it not been for Shevardnadze.


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Commitment to the nonuse of force became Shevardnadze’s most important contribution to the end of communism and the Cold War, permitting the virtually nonviolent demise of the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union itself. Shevardnadze was more adamant on this issue than was Gorbachev; he opposed the use of force in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989 and in the Baltics in 1990. Shevardnadze recognized from his Georgian experience that the use of force against non-Russian minorities would be counterproductive, and particularly opposed Gorbachev’s reliance on the military. Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister because of Gorbachev’s turn to the political right wing and, during his resignation speech in December 1990, he predicted that the use of force would undermine perestroika. The violence in Lithuania and Latvia three weeks later, condoned by Gorbachev, proved him right. When Shevardnadze returned to Georgia, he initially ruled by emergency decree, without the legitimacy of law and with the support of corrupt and brutal paramilitary forces. Finally elected Georgia’s second president in 1995 (and reelected in 2000), he embarked on another campaign to rid Georgia of corruption, reform the economy, and restore political stability. In 1992 Shevardnadze returned to an independent Georgia that was far worse off than when he had departed for Moscow nearly seven years earlier. His predecessor, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an ultra-nationalist who was both inept and corrupt, used his office to restrict civil liberties and to accumulate great personal wealth. Civil strife was destroying the country, and the economy was in ruins. As the head of the state, Shevardnadze was forced to pursue a humiliating course, taking Georgia into the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States in 1993 and requesting a Russian military presence in western Georgia to counter secessionist forces in Abkhazia. Just as he had been accused of favoring Western interests when he was Soviet foreign minister, now he was charged with betraying Georgian interests as chairman of his ancestral homeland. Shevardnadze survived at least two wellorganized assassination attempts in 1995 and 1998 as well as bloody conflicts with ethnic separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Russian wars in nearby Chechnya led to increased pressure on his government from Moscow and a greater Russian presence along Georgia’s borders. Increased Russian involvement in the Caucasus, instability in Central Asia, and weak neighboring


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governments in Armenia and Azerbaijan added to the pressures on Shevardnadze. Numerous scandals within the Georgian military weakened national security and gave Russian forces greater opportunities to penetrate the Georgian military. Increased U.S. involvement in Central Asia because of the war against terrorism, the Russian interest in the Caucasus because of the war in Chechnya, and the overall political and military weakness of the states of the Caucasus had the potential to contribute to Shevardnadze’s vulnerability. Shevardnadze, who could have retired from public life in 1991 as an honored statesman, engaged in yet another battle, this time to keep his country from self-destruction. The opposition of high-ranking Russian general officers, who blamed Shevardnadze for the demilitarization and breakup of the Soviet Union, were likely to contribute to the discontinuity of his government in Tbilisi. Unlike Gorbachev, who turned to writing books and delivering lectures, Shevardnadze chose a different path—one that nearly cost him his life on more than one occasion. With its breathtakingly beautiful Black Sea coast, mountains, ancient culture, rich agricultural land, and energetic people, Georgia could certainly emerge as a peaceful and prosperous modern state, and Shevardnadze’s first priority was to advance the country toward that goal.

See also:

GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; MOVEMENT FOR DE-

MOCRATIC REFORMS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ekedahl, Carolyn McGiffert, and Goodman, Melvin A. (2001). The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze. Washington, DC: Brassey’s. Palazchenko, Pavel. (1997). My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Shevardnadze, Eduard. (1991). The Future Belongs to Freedom. New York: The Free Press. Shevardnadze, Eduard. (1991). My Choice: In Defense of Democracy and Freedom. Moscow: Novosti. MELVIN GOODMAN

SHEVCHENKO, TARAS GREGOREVICH (1814–1861), Ukraine’s national poet. Born a serf, Taras Shevchenko was orphaned early in life. His owner noticed his artistic ability

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while he was serving as a houseboy and apprenticed him to an icon and mural painter. In 1838 some Russian and Ukrainian intellectuals in St. Petersburg organized a lottery and used the proceeds to buy his freedom. Afterwards, Shevchenko studied under Karl Briullov at the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1845. While still a student, he published a short collection of romantic poems, Kobzar (The Bard, 1840), that established his reputation as a poet. His early folklorism and idealization of the Cossacks soon gave way to poetry of social critique that prophesied rebellion. Shevchenko’s poems of the 1840s denounced serfdom and the Russian autocracy and celebrated Slavic brotherhood. In 1847 he was arrested in Kiev on the charge of belonging to the secret Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. A search by the gendarmes discovered his satirical poems, including an unflattering portrayal of Nicholas I and his wife, and in consequence the tsar sentenced Shevchenko to military service in Central Asia, adding a special prohibition on writing and painting. Following his release in 1857, Shevchenko was not permitted to reside in Ukraine. He settled in St. Petersburg, where he died in 1861.

Shevchenko, Taras. (1964). Poetical Works, trans. C. H. Andrusyshen and Watson Kirkconnell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Shevchenko was a realist artist of note. Even during his lifetime, his contribution to the development of modern Ukrainian culture and national consciousness earned him the reputation of Ukraine’s “national bard.” His sophisticated poetical works transformed folk idioms into a modern literary product, while his vision of popular justice and democracy influenced generations of Ukrainian activists. After Shevchenko’s death, Ukrainian patriots transferred his remains to Chernecha Hill near Kaniv, in Ukraine, which immediately became a place of pilgrimage. The cult of Shevchenko continued to grow in Ukraine during the twentieth century, for patriots viewed him as a symbol of national culture and statehood. In the eyes of the communists, however, Shevchenko was a symbol of social liberation and friendship with Russia. In post-Soviet Ukraine Shevchenko is the most revered figure in the pantheon of the nation’s “founding fathers.”

In February 1917 Shlyapnikov led the Bolshevik Party organization in Petrograd and became a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Subsequently Shlyapnikov became chairman of the All-Russian Metalworkers’ Union (1917–1921). He became commissar of labor (1917–1918) after the October 1917 Revolution. During the Russian civil war, Shlyapnikov was chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Caspian-Caucasian Front (1918–1919).

See also:

CYRIL AND METHODIUS SOCIETY; NATIONALISM

IN THE SOVIET UNION; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Zaitsev, Pavlo. (1988). Taras Shevchenko: A Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. SERHY YEKELCHYK

SHLYAPNIKOV, ALEXANDER GAVRILOVICH (1885–1937), highly skilled metalworker, trade union leader, and revolutionary. Alexander Shlyapnikov, an ethnic Russian from the town of Murom in central Russia, joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1902 and became a Bolshevik in 1903; he was imprisoned in 1904 and 1905–1907. From 1908 to 1916 he lived in Western Europe. During World War I, Shlyapnikov organized a route through Scandinavia into Russia for smuggling illegal Marxist literature and Bolshevik correspondence.

From 1919 to 1921 Shlyapnikov led the Workers’ Opposition and advocated the role of unionized workers in directing and organizing the economy. Shlyapnikov continued to criticize Soviet economic policy and treatment of workers throughout the 1920s. In 1933 he was purged from the Communist Party. In 1935 he was arrested on false charges, imprisoned, and sent into internal exile. In 1936 he was arrested again. In September 1937, in a closed session, the Military College of the USSR Supreme Court found Shlyapnikov guilty of terrorist activities, based on false testimony from compromised witnesses, and ordered his execution. Shlyapnikov was rehabilitated of criminal charges in 1963 and restored to membership in the Communist Party in 1988.

Grabowicz, George G. (1982). The Poet as Mythmaker: A Study of Symbolic Meaning in Taras Ševcenko. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

See also:

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PARTY; WORKERS’ OPPOSITION

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Daniels, Robert. (1988). The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Shliapnikov, Alexander. (1982). On the Eve of 1917, tr. Richard Chappell. London: Allison and Busby. BARBARA ALLEN

SHOCK THERAPY The term shock therapy has come to arouse a great deal of controversy. Its original use was related to the use of electrical shocks as therapy in psychiatric treatment. In economic policy, it has been used to describe powerful austerity measures designed to break spirals of very rapid inflation. More recently, it has been used as a blanket term for policies designed to reform the postsocialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The latter also is where the main controversies have arisen. The divergence of opinion concerning reform policy can be attributed in large part to the disparate nature of the tasks involved. Setting out to break inflation is different from seeking to undertake a broad socioeconomic transformation from failed centrally planned economies into functioning market economies. Above all, the political implications are very different. In a first stage, beginning after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, postsocialist governments in Central Europe embarked on economic reform programs that featured rapid liberalization and broadbased privatization. It has been held by some that those who succeeded did so because they applied shock therapy. Others, notably so people from the region, have rejected such claims, arguing that foreign advice had little to do with their achievements. The main test of shock therapy came in the first half of 1992, when the Russian government of Yegor Gaidar sought to implement rapid and radical systemic change. The bulk of all prices were liberalized and state owned enterprises were informed that their life support systems, in the form of direct financial links to the state budget, would be terminated. It was believed that this “shock” to the system also would bring a form of therapy in its wake. As enterprise managers realized that they could no longer count on automatic subsidies from the state


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budget, they would be forced into producing goods that could be sold on real markets, at prices that would cover their costs. It was expected that within a period of one-half of one year or so the transition should be completed. From there on the Russian economy would be growing at a healthy pace, and no more foreign economic support would be needed. By the summer of 1992 it became painfully evident that the project was failing. Enterprises had responded to the government’s austerity measures not by cultivating markets, but by developing a subsequently chronic practice of non-payments. Losses of government subsidies were met by reduced payments on due taxes and wages. Failures to receive payments from customers were met by refusals to pay suppliers. Reduced government orders were met by reductions in output, but could not result in closures since there was no bankruptcy law. It was also clear that the associated ambitions of bringing stability to government finance had met with equal disaster. Inflation was spiraling out of control, ending up at well more than 2,000 percent for the year as a whole, and persistent deficits in the state budget would come to haunt the government for several years to come. Ten years later the evidence remains fairly bleak. Between 1991 and 1998, the Russian economy lost around 40 percent of GDP and more than 80 percent of capital investment. There was mass impoverishment of the population, serious decay of the country’s infrastructure, and a general widening of the technology gap against the industrialized world. In August 1998, a brewing financial crisis produced a massive crash, leaving investors with tens of billions of dollars in losses. In the policy debates that surrounded the initial failures of rapid systemic change, two different sides emerged. One side, representing many market analysts, argued that the reason behind the initial failures was linked to insufficient shock. In their view, the crash of 1998 actually was a good thing, laying the groundwork for the economic upturn in 2000 and 2001. The other side, representing mainly non-economists and a minority of uninvolved academic economists, held that the policy of shock therapy as such has been at fault, and that a set of alternative policies would have allowed much of the destruction to be avoided. Today it would seem fair to say that the latter represents the majority view.

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See also:

ECONOMY, CURRENT; GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMURO-

VICH; PRIVATIZATION; YELTSIN, BORIS.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aslund, Anders. (1995). How Russia Became a Market Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Hedlund, Stefan. (1999). Russia’s “Market” Economy. London: UCL Press. Nelson, Lynn D., and Kuzes, Irina. (1995). Radical Reform in Yeltsin’s Russia. New York: M.E. Sharpe. STEFAN HEDLUND

tion (known as “storming”) associated with shockwork was ill suited to complex and interrelated production processes. Shockwork became a regular feature of Soviet industrial and agricultural life in the post-Stalin era as a result of the responsibility placed on lower-level trade union, Komsomol, and party officials to exercise leadership and record progress along bureaucratically predetermined lines. Workers seeking to extract favors from these organizations or demonstrate their suitability for promotion into their ranks went along with the game.

See also:

INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; STAKHANOVITE

MOVEMENT; SUBBOTNIK

SHOCKWORKERS Shockworkers (udarniki), a term originating during the Russian Civil War to designate workers performing especially arduous or urgent tasks, reemerged during the late 1920s and was applied thereafter to all workers and employees who assumed and fulfilled obligations over and above their work assignments. The rise of the Stakhanovite movement in 1935 reduced the prestige of the shockworker title, and it all but disappeared during the late 1940s and early 1950s, only to resurface again under the guise of shockworkers of Communist labor. From about ten million in 1966, the number of such workers increased to 17.9 million in 1971 and twenty-four million (or twentysix percent of all wage and salary workers) by 1975. The checkered history of shockwork in the USSR faithfully mirrors changing approaches by the Communist Party to the task of mobilizing workers and stimulating their commitment to raising labor productivity. If during the Civil War it was associated with voluntary Communist Saturdays (subbotniki), then during the late 1920s it arose primarily among young industrial workers who were eager to demonstrate their skills on new equipment and methods of production. From 1929 onward, shockwork invariably was linked with socialist competitions in which brigades of workers overfulfilling production quotas or meeting other obligations assumed in competition agreements were rewarded with prizes and privileged access to scarce goods and services.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kuromiya, Hiroaki. (1988). Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932. New York: Cambridge University Press. LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM

SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL ALEXANDROVICH (1905–1984), Russian writer and Soviet loyalist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965. Mikhail Sholokhov was born in the Don Cossack military region in 1905. During the civil war he joined the Bolsheviks, twice being on the verge of execution for his views. In 1922 he moved to Moscow to pursue a career as a writer. In 1924 he published his first short story and then published regularly throughout the 1920s. After 1924 he moved back to the Cossack regions to remain close to his stories. The first volume of his most important work, the Quiet Flows the Don (Tikhii Don, 1928–1940) was published in 1928. It is a portrayal of the struggles of the Don Cossacks against the Red army in Southern Russia, and is noted for its objectivity and lack of positive Bolshevik characters. The work was an instant success. Sholokhov would publish three more volumes in the course of his lifetime. This work has been tainted by unsubstantiated claims of plagiarism.

But as the number of shockworkers increased to slightly more than forty percent of all industrial workers, the value of the title became debased. Moreover, the brief period of extra physical exer-

His second major novel was the story of the triumph of collectivization in the early 1930s, entitled Virgin Soil Upturned (Podnyataya tselina, 1932–1960). This work was trumpeted as one of the masterpieces of Socialist Realism.

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Sholokhov joined the Communist Party in 1932 and was a loyal adherent to the party line for the rest of his life, though outspoken in his criticism of the quality of Soviet writing. He was one of the most honored authors of the Soviet period. His short stories and novels were published in massive editions. He was a member of the Supreme Soviet and Central Committee, awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, and won both the Lenin and Stalin Prizes. He was acknowledged for his writing in the West as well, receiving the Nobel Prize of literature in 1965 for Tikhii Don.

See also:

SOCIALIST REALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ermolaev, Herman. (1982). Mikhail Sholokhov and His Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sholokhov, Mikhail. (1959). Virgin Soil Upturned, tr. Stephen Garry. New York: Knopf. Sholokhov, Mikhail. (1996). Quiet Flows the Don, tr. Robert Daglish. New York: Carroll & Graf. KARL E. LOEWENSTEIN

SHORT COURSE The central text of the Josef Stalin-era party catechism, The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)—Short Course was compulsory reading for Soviet citizens of all walks of life between 1938 and 1956. This textbook traced the origins of the Russian revolutionary movement to tsarist industrialization efforts after 1861. Early agrarian populists gave way during the 1880s to Marxist Social Democrats, who acted in the name of the nascent working class. By the mid-1890s, Vladimir Ilich Lenin had emerged to guide this movement through police persecution and internal division (versus the Mensheviks, “Legal Marxists,” and Economists); his leadership allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power in 1917. Subsequently, Lenin plotted a course through civil war and foreign intervention toward the construction of a socialist economy. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin navigated the USSR successfully through shock industrialization, agricultural collectivization, and the defense of the revolution’s gains against internal and external enemies. All but several sections on dialectical materialism were actually drafted by E. M. Yaroslavsky, P. N. Pospelov,


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and V. G. Knorin before being edited for publication by Stalin and members of his entourage. A seminal text, the Short Course epitomized a belief held by Soviet authorities after the early 1930s that history ought to play a fundamental role in party indoctrination efforts. This was signaled by a letter Stalin wrote to the journal Proletarskaya revolyutsia (Proletarian Revolution) in 1931 in which he denounced party historians for daring to question even minor aspects of Lenin’s leadership. Party historians floundered in the wake of this scandal, forcing Soviet authorities to clarify the party’s new expectations on “the historical front.” Existing party histories were too inaccessible and insufficiently inspiring for what was still a poorly educated society. A long-standing focus on anonymous social forces and abstract materialist analysis was to be replaced by a new emphasis on heroic individuals, pivotal events, and the connection of party history to that of Soviet society as a whole. These demands reflected the Soviet leadership’s intention to treat both party and state history as motivational propaganda. Editorial brigades under Yaroslavsky, Knorin, P. P. Popov, Lavrenti Beria, and others struggled to address these new demands, although the situation was complicated by the Great Terror. Repeated exposure of traitors within the Soviet elite between 1936 and 1938 made it difficult to write a stable narrative about the party. A lack of progress led the party leadership to ask Yaroslavsky, Pospelov, and Knorin to combine forces on a single advanced text. Knorin’s arrest during the summer of 1937, however, forced Yaroslavsky and Pospelov to focus exclusively on the jointly authored manuscript, redrafting it under the supervision of Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov, and Vyacheslav Molotov. Released in the fall of 1938, the Short Course was hailed as an ideological breakthrough that succeeded in situating party history within a broader Russo-Soviet historical context. Moreover, its tight focus on Lenin and Stalin ensured that the text would survive future purges (although at the cost of conflating party history with the cult of personality). Ubiquitous after the printing of more than forty-two million copies, the Short Course reigned over party educational efforts for eighteen years, authoritative until Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the personality cult in 1956.

See also:

STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

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Brandenberger, David. (1999). “The ‘Short Course’ to Modernity: Stalinist History Textbooks, Mass Culture, and the Formation of Russian Popular National Identity, 1934–1956.” Ph.D. diss, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. DAVID BRANDENBERGER

SHOSTAKOVICH, DMITRI DMITRIEVICH (1906–1975), highly controversial composer, at the same time outstanding musical representative of the Soviet Union and tragic figure in tension between acceptance and rejection of his music by the Soviet regime. Dmitry Shostakovich’s acculturation and his musical training at the Petrograd, then Leningrad, conservatory took place in the new Soviet state. Overnight Shostakovich rose to fame with a rousing performance of his first symphony in 1926. He was seen as a beacon of hope in Soviet music. The young composer succeeded in fulfilling the highflying expectations in the following years. Overwhelming applause was given to the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District (1934). This coarsely realistic work based on a novel by Nikolay Leskov was celebrated as a first milestone in the development of a genuine Soviet musical theatre. In 1936, however, a devastating review based on ideological criteria was published in Pravda. Shostakovich was caught—after Josef Stalin had watched the opera with greatest displeasure—in the trap of the aggressive, intrigue-dominated cultural policy. The composer was branded in public as aesthetizing formalist and his work as extreme left abnormality. These typical expressions of Soviet politico-cultural discourse meant that his music was too dissonant and complicated for Party taste. Ensuing condemnations not only by the officialdom but even by previously enthusiastic fellow composers greatly worried Shostakovich, as did the arrest and execution of his friend and patron Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky in the course of the Great Terror in 1937. Nonetheless, during the same year he managed to rehabilitate himself with his fifth symphony. In fact, the work signals a clear stylistic turn to a more moderate musical language, but to attribute this exclusively to political pressure seems misguided. Previous works indicate a break with aesthetic radicalism; moreover, Shostakovich practiced all his life through diverse styles of composi-

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tion. He even wrote operetta-like light music, which cannot be dismissed simply as reluctantly performed commissioned work. From the end of the 1930s, however, Shostakovich successfully developed forms of musical expression that realized his aesthetical ideas and at the same time met the demands of Socialist Realism for comprehensibility and popular appeal. His individuality and heterogeneity, his inclination toward the grotesque and sarcasm, and the profound seriousness and expressiveness of his works left the audience fascinated, but again and again provoked conflicts with the official state organs. In spite of vehement accusations in 1948, he soon was integrated again into the Soviet music elite, but only the Thaw following Stalin’s death made general conditions more favorable for the composer and his oeuvre. During his last two decades he could act as a respected personality of Soviet cultural life. Shostakovich and his work have been highly disputed and exposed to ideologically charged interpretations. Shostakovich was seen as a faithful communist, an opportunistic conformist, a secret dissident, or an oppressed genius. In any case, he was a Soviet citizen, who, like many others, stood by his home country but also got in trouble with its officials. Regardless of all political factors, he was one of the outstanding composers of the Soviet Union and perhaps the last great symphonist of music history.

See also:

CULTURAL REVOLUTION; MUSIC; PURGES, THE

GREAT; THAW, THE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartlett, Rosamund. (2000). Shostakovich in Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fanning, David, ed. (1998). Shostakovich Studies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fay, Laurel E. (2000). Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ho, Allan B. (2000). Shostakovich Reconsidered. London: Toccata Press. MATTHIAS STADELMANN

SHOW TRIALS Staged trials of opponents of the Soviet regime held in Moscow between 1936 and 1938. The most visible aspect of Josef Stalin’s Great Purges was a series of three Moscow show trials


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staged in August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938. Former leading members of the Bolshevik Party were put on trial for treason and generally confessed, often after being physically tortured, to participation in elaborate terrorist conspiracies against the Soviet state, ranking officials of the Communist Party, and Stalin personally. The trials were carefully staged and scripted, covered in the national and international press, and intended to justify in public the purges of the Party and the state apparatus that Stalin was implementing in 1937 and 1938. The sixteen defendants at the first trial, including Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, described by the prosecutors as the “Trotskyity-Zinovievite Terrorist Center,” were charged with plotting to kill Stalin and several of his top lieutenants, including Sergei Kirov, who had been assassinated in 1934, very likely on Stalin’s orders. All sixteen were found guilty and shot within twenty-four hours of the verdict. The defendants at the second trial, including Yuri Piatakov, Karl Radek, and fifteen other prominent Old Bolsheviks, termed the “Parallel Center” by the prosecutors, were charged with plotting terrorist acts and engaging in active espionage in the service of Japan and Nazi Germany. Thirteen of the defendants were shot. The final and most important of the three trials included several of the most prominent members of the Bolshevik old guard: Nikolai Bukharin, Politburo member and chief theorist of the NEP; Alexei Rykov, chair of the Council of People’s Commissars; and Genrikh Yagoda, head of the Secret Police (NKVD) until 1936. The twenty-two defendants in this trial, members of a putative Anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyite Bloc, confessed under extreme physical pressure to terrorism, conspiracy to kill Party leaders, espionage, the murder of Maxim Gorky, and the attempted murder of Vladimir Lenin in 1918, among other crimes. Bukharin, the most important defendant, accepted responsibility for all the crimes named in the indictment but refused to confess to specific criminal actions; nonetheless, he was sentenced to death along with eighteen of the other defendants. Stalin and his secret police tightly controlled all three trials from behind the scenes; the outcome was preordained. The term show trials usually refers to the Moscow trials, but it can also denote the numerous other trials staged throughout the USSR in 1937 and 1938, under orders from Stalin and the


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Politburo. The Bolsheviks organized these provincial show trials, at least seventy of which were approved by the Politburo, to show the people that saboteurs, “wreckers,” and traitors were a threat even at the local level. Finally, the term can also describe any number of staged political trials held throughout the early Soviet period, especially between 1921 and 1924 and again from 1928 to 1933, such as the Industrial Party trial of 1930, in which eight prominent technical and engineering specialists were accused of sabotage and espionage and were sentenced to terms in prison.

See also:

GREAT PURGES, THE; GULAG; STALIN, JOSEF VIS-

SARIONOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1993). “How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces.” Russian Review 52:299–320. Medvedev, Roy. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Columbia University Press. PAUL M. HAGENLOH

SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH (1552–1612), tsar of Russia (1606–1610). Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky was a descendant of one of the oldest and most illustrious princely families of Russia. His uncle, Ivan Petrovich Shuisky, was one of the regents of the mentally retarded Tsar Fyodor I, and Vasily became a boyar at Fyodor’s court. During the late 1580s, Boris Godunov (Tsar Fyodor’s brother-in-law) managed to become sole regent, and Shuisky clan members were banished from Moscow; some of them died mysteriously while in exile. By 1591, however, Vasily and his three younger brothers (sons of Ivan Andreyevich Shuisky) were back in the capital, where Vasily became the leader of the family and resumed his place in the boyar council. When Dmitry of Uglich (Tsar Ivan IV’s youngest son) died mysteriously in 1591, Vasily Shuisky was chosen to lead the investigation; he concluded that the boy accidentally killed himself.

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Upon the death of Tsar Fyodor in 1598, Shuisky made no attempt to prevent Boris Godunov from becoming tsar; nevertheless, Tsar Boris feared and persecuted the Shuisky clan. During False Dmitry’s invasion of Russia, however, Tsar Boris turned to Vasily Shuisky for help. In January 1605 Shuisky took command of the tsar’s army fighting against False Dmitry and defeated Dmitry’s forces at the battle of Dobrynichi. Shuisky then waged a terror campaign against the population of southwestern Russia that had sided with False Dmitry. In the meantime, the rebellion in the name of the true tsar spread like wildfire. After Tsar Boris’s death in April 1605, Shuisky was recalled to Moscow by Tsar Fyodor II, and he did not participate in the rebellions that overthrew the Godunov dynasty. At the outset of Tsar Dmitry’s reign, Shuisky was convicted of treason but was only briefly exiled. Back in Moscow, he secretly plotted to overthrow Tsar Dmitry, claiming that Dmitry was an impostor named Grigory Otrepev. During the celebration of Tsar Dmitry’s wedding to the Polish Princess Marina Mniszech in May 1606, Shuisky created a diversion while his henchmen killed the tsar. Shuisky managed to seize power, but many Russians were unwilling to accept the usurper Tsar Vasily IV. His enemies circulated rumors that Tsar Dmitry had survived the assassination attempt and would soon return to punish the traitors. Within a few weeks, Tsar Vasily was confronted by a powerful civil war that spread from southwestern Russia to over half the country. In the fall of 1606, rebel forces under Ivan Bolotnikov besieged Moscow and nearly toppled Shuisky. Tsar Vasily’s armies drove the rebels back and eventually defeated Bolotnikov in late 1607, but by then another rebel army supporting the second false Dmitry challenged Shuisky’s weak grip on the country. For many months Russia had two tsars and two capitals, and chaos reigned throughout the land. In desperation, Tsar Vasily eventually turned to Sweden for support. In 1609 King Karl IX sent military forces into Russia to aid Shuisky and seize territory. That prompted Polish military intervention, and in June 1610 Tsar Vasily’s army was crushed by Polish forces at the battle of Klushino. In Moscow a rebellion of aristocrats (including the Romanovs) toppled Tsar Vasily, forcing him to become a monk. Soon Moscow opened its gates to the Polish army, and Shuisky was shipped off to Poland, where he was imprisoned and died in September 1612.

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See also:

BOLOTNIKOV, IVAN ISAYEVICH; DMITRY, FALSE;

FILARET ROMANOV, PATRIARCH; MNISZECH, MARINA; TIME OF TROUBLES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bussow, Conrad. (1994). The Disturbed State of the Russian Realm, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s. Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Massa, Issac. (1982). A Short History of the Beginnings and Origins of These Present Wars in Moscow, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan. (1988). The Time of Troubles: Russia in Crisis, 1604–1618, tr. Hugh Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. CHESTER S. L. DUNNING

SHUMEIKO, VLADIMIR FILIPPOVICH (b. 1945), Russian legislator. Vladimir Shumeiko graduated from Rostov Polytechnical Institute with an engineering degree in 1972. He made his early career as an engineer in Krasnodar. After working at the Krasnodar Electrical Measurement Instruments Factory (1963–1970), he moved to the All-Union Research Electrical Measurement Instruments Institute (1970–1985), then returned to Krasnodar as head of the electrical instruments production association. Shumeiko’s political career began in 1990, when he was elected to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. He followed that victory with a seat in the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. Also in 1990, he was named deputy chair of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Committee on Economic and Property Reform. As “shock therapy” reforms unfolded, Boris Yeltsin brought several industrial directors into his government. Shumeiko, president of the Confederation of Associations of Entrepreneurs, was appointed first deputy prime minister in June 1992; in December the new prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin reappointed him as first deputy chair. In the fall of 1993, the Supreme Soviet began investigating several members of Yeltsin’s cabinet for corruption, including Shumeiko. He briefly resigned from the government on September 1 and


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joined Yeltsin in plotting what to do with the recalcitrant legislature. Shumeiko returned to the government on September 22, after Yeltsin’s order to dissolve parliament. The next month, Yeltsin named him Minister of Press and Information. Shumeiko switched to the newly created Federation Council, becoming chair of that house in January 1994, a post that also gave him a seat on the Russian Security Council. He formed his own political movement, Reforms—New Course, in December 1994. Shumeiko lost his seat in January 1996, when Yeltsin changed the basis of membership in the Federation Council. Since then, Shumeiko has unsuccessfully tried to return to a legislative office. As of 2003 he was chairman of the petroleum company Evikhon.

See also:

YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

ANN E. ROBERTSON

SIBERIA Often called the “Wild East,” beautiful but austere, Siberia is one of the least populated places on earth. Western Siberia is the world’s largest and flattest plain, across which tributaries of the Ob and Irtysh rivers wend their way north to the Arctic Ocean. This orientation means that in spring the mouths of the rivers are yet frozen while their upper reaches thaw, creating the world’s largest peat bog in the middle of the plain; thus, the lowland is arable only in the extreme south. Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East tend to be rugged and mountainous, with thin soils at best. Beneath this chiefly soil-less veneer lies some of the world’s oldest rock. Higher mountains and active volcanoes rise along the easternmost edge, where the Pacific Ocean plate subducts beneath Asia. Here also the majority of the rivers drain northward, perpendicular to the main eastwest axis of settlement. Only along the Pacific seaboard do the rivers flow east, the longest of which is the Amur, which, together with its tributaries, forms the boundary between China and Russia. On the border between Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, the region boasts the world’s oldest and deepest lake, Baikal. Including some of the purest water on earth, Lake Baikal holds more than twenty percent of the globe’s freshwater resources. Human settlement resembles a mostly urban, beaded archipelago strung along the Trans-Siberian


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Railroad from the Urals cities of Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok, 4,000 miles away in the east. In between, rest the large cities of Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk. Novosibirsk, which means “New Siberia,” is largest of all with 1.5 million people. The densest settlement pattern conforms to Siberia’s least severe climates, which align themselves in parallel belts from harsh to harshest at right angles to a southwest-northeast trend line. Deep within the interior of Asia and surrounded by mostly frozen seas, Siberia experiences the most continental climates on the planet. One-time maxima of more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) are possible in the relatively short Siberian summers except along the coasts, whereas one-time minima of minus-ninety degrees Fahrenheit (–68 degrees Celsius) have been recorded in the long winters of Sakha (Yakutia). This broad range of temperatures is not recorded anywhere else. Fortunately, the winter frost is typically dry and windless, affording some relief to the isolated towns and hamlets located in the sparsely populated northeast. Although western geographers accept the entire northeastern quadrant of Eurasia as the region known as Siberia, Russian geographers officially accept only Western and Eastern Siberia as such, excluding the Russian Far East, or Russia’s Pacific Rim. Including the Russian Far East, Siberia spans 5,207,900 square miles (13,488,400 square kilometers) and makes up more than three-fourths of the Russian land mass. By this definition, Siberia is a fourth bigger than Canada, the world’s second largest country. It extends from the Ural Mountains on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east. North to south it spans an empty realm from the Arctic Ocean to the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. It is empty because, although it occupies 23 percent of Eurasia, it environs less than 1 percent of the continent’s population. Siberia is so massive that citizens of the U.S. state of Maine are closer to Moscow than are residents of Siberia’s Pacific Coast. The Russian word Sibir has at least six controversial origins, ranging from Hunnic to Mongolic to Russian. The Mongol definition is “marshy forest,” which certainly typifies much of the Siberian landscape. To many Westerners, the name evokes a popular misconception that people who live in Siberia are exiles or forced laborers. Although it is accurate

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Schoolchildren cross-country ski on the frozen Tura River near Tyumen. © DEAN CONGER/CORBIS

to suggest that the region became a place of exile as early as the 1600s and remained that way long after, most Siberians freely migrated there. The Great Siberian Migration, which occurred between 1885 and 1914, witnessed the voluntary movement of 4 million Slavic peasants into the southern tier of the area, facilitated by the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891–1916). In fact, the tributary area of that railway became, and remains, the primary area of Siberian settlement. The rest of Siberia represents a vast underdeveloped backwater, containing fewer than one person per square mile.

harshest regions. After 1991, when the incentives were terminated, hundreds of thousands of residents departed for more hospitable and economically stable destinations.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin successfully endeavored to force the development of the “backwater” by creating a vast system of labor camps, further tarnishing Siberia’s image. At least 1.5 million forced laborers and convicts occupied the region’s north and east between 1936 and 1953. Some of the camps remained in use until the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). Between 1953 and 1991, extraordinary financial and material incentives lured the vast majority of migrants to the

See also:

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Although Siberia’s future is unpredictable, the region remains rich in resources. Most lie in austere, largely unexplored areas far from potential consumers. Thus, like their relatives of the past, modern Russians continue to refer to Siberia as the future or cupboard of the nation. Unfortunately, although teeming with natural wealth, the cupboard remains locked. CHINA, RELATIONS WITH; FAR EASTERN REGION;

NORTHERN PEOPLES; PACIFIC FLEET; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bobrick, Benson. (1992). East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia. New York: Poseidon. Bychkova-Jordan, Bella, and Jordan-Bychkov, Terry. (2001). Siberian Village: Land and Life in the Sakha Republic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


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Hudgins, Sharon W. (2003). The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1994). The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House. Marx, Steven G. (1991). Road to Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.. Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Thubron, Colin. (1999). In Siberia. New York: Harper Collins. Treadgold, Donald W. (1957). The Great Siberian Migration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tupper, Harmon. (1965). To the Great Ocean. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. VICTOR L. MOTE

He settled in the United States in 1919, eventually founding the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation, the forerunner of the Sikorsky Division of United Technologies. In the early twenty-first century the corporation manufactures helicopters for sale around the world. Continually designing aircraft, Sikorsky received many other patents, including patents for helicopter control and stability systems. He grasped the humanitarian advantages of helicopters over airplanes. “If a man is in need of rescue,” he said, “an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that’s just about all . . . but a direct-lift aircraft could come in and save his life.” In the 1930s, Sikorsky designed and manufactured a series of large passenger-carrying flying boats that pioneered the transoceanic commercial air routes in the Caribbean and Pacific.

See also:

SIGNPOSTS See

A G E

AVIATION

VEKHI. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cochrane, Dorothy. (1989). The Aviation Careers of Igor Sikorsky. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hunt, William E. (1998). ’Heelicopter’: Pioneering with Igor Sikorsky: Based on a Personal Account. Shrewsbury, UK: Airlife Pub.

SIKORSKY, IGOR IVANOVICH (1889–1972), scientist, engineer, pilot, and entrepreneur. Igor Sikorsky designed the world’s first fourengined airplane in 1913 (precursor to the most successful bomber of World War I) and the world’s first true production helicopter. His single-rotor design, a major breakthrough in helicopter technology, remains the dominant configuration in the early twenty-first century. The winged-S emblem still signifies the world’s most advanced rotorcraft. Born in Kiev, Russia, Sikorsky was the youngest of five children. His father, a medical doctor and psychologist, inspired him to explore and learn. He developed a keen interest in mechanics and astronomy. While still a schoolboy he built several model aircraft and helicopters, as well as bombs. After completing formal education in Russia and France, Sikorsky attracted international recognition in 1913 at the age of twenty-four when he designed and flew the first multimotor airplane. In 1918, Sikorsky decided to flee his native country: “What were called the ideals and principles of the Marxist revolution were not acceptable to me.” He left Petrograd (St. Petersburg) by rail for Murmansk and from there boarded a steamer for England. Having lost all his savings, he arrived in England with only a few hundred English pounds.


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Sikorsky, Igor Ivan. (1941). The Story of the Winged-S: With New Material on the Latest Development of the Helicopter; an Autobiography by Igor I. Sikorsky; with Many Illustrations from the Author’s Collection of Photographs. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. Spenser, Jay P. (1998). Whirlybirds: A History of the U.S. Helicopter Pioneers. Seattle: University of Washington Press. JOHANNA GRANVILLE

SILVER AGE From the late nineteenth century until World War I, the Russian visual, literary, and performing arts achieved such creative brilliance that observers— not least the critic and poet Sergei Makovsky (1878– 1962)—described the period as a “Silver Age.” Many individuals, institutions, and ideas contributed to this renaissance: Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) and the St. Petersburg World of Art; painters Lev Bakst (1866–1924), Viktor Borisov-Musatov (1870–1905), and Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910); writers Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942), Andrei Bely (pseudonym of Boris Bugayev, 1880–1934), Alexander Blok (1880–1921), Valery Bryusov (1873–1924),

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and Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949); the Ballets Russes; the new theaters with their repertoires of Ibsen and Maeterlinck; and the architecture of the style moderne—all shared the eschatological mood of the fin de siècle heightened by the disasters of the RussoJapanese War and the 1905 Revolution. There was a climactic and ominous sense in the culture of the Russian Silver Age, for its poetry spoke of femmes fatales and fleshly indulgence, and its painting depicted twilights and satanic beasts. Perhaps even more than the Western European Symbolists, the Russian poets, painters, and philosophers made every effort to escape the present by looking back to an Arcadian landscape of pristine myth and fable or by looking forwards to a utopian synthesis of art, religion, and organic life. For Russia’s children of the fin de siècle, Symbolism became much more than a mere esthetic tendency; rather, it represented an entire worldview and a way of life that informed the intense visions of Bely, Blok, and Vrubel; the religious explorations of the priest, mathematician, and art historian Pavel Florensky (1882–1937); the decorative flourishes of Bakst and Alexandre Benois (1870–1960); and even the abstract systems of Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935). Bely’s novel Petersburg, Blok’s poem “The Stranger,” Vrubel’s images of torment and distress, and the galvanizing music of Alexander Skryabin (1872–1915) all express the nervous tension and febrile energy of the Russian Silver Age. Its most original artist was Vrubel, whose fertile imagination produced disconcerting pictures such as Demon Downcast (1902, Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow; hereafter “TG”). While the definitions “Art Nouveau” and “Neo-Nationalism” come to mind in the context of his work, Vrubel approached the act of painting as a constant process of experimentation, returning to his major canvases again and again, erasing, repainting, altering. His releasing of the energy of the ornament and his intense elaboration of the surface even prompted future critics to consider his painting in the context of Cubism, for his broken brushwork strangely anticipated the visual dislocation of the late 1900s.

this interdisciplinarity, the principal artistic and intellectual society with which many of them were associated was called the “World of Art.” Hostile toward both the Academy and nineteenth century Realism, the World of Art owed its singular vision, practical organization, and public effect to Diaghilev, who in 1898 launched the famous magazine of the same name (Mir iskusstva, 1898–1904), sponsored a cycle of important national and international exhibitions, and propagated Russian art and music successfully in the West. The World of Art artists and writers never issued a written manifesto, but their attention to artistic craft, cult of retrospective beauty, and assumed distance from the ills of sociopolitical reality indicated a firm belief in “art for art’s sake” and a sense of measured grace, which they identified with the haunting beauty of St. Petersburg. The fame of several World of Art painters, particularly Bakst and Benois, rests primarily on their set and costume designs for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–1929), which, with its emphasis on artistic synthesis, evocation of archaic or exotic cultures, and invention of a new choreographic, musical, and visual communication, can be regarded as an extension of the Symbolist platform. The ease with which the World of Art transferred pictorial ideas from studio to stage (for instance, productions such as Cléopatre of 1909, designed by Bakst, Petrouchka of 1911, designed by Benois, and Le Sacre du Printemps of 1913, designed by Nicholas Roerich [1874–1947]) was indicative of a general tendency toward “theatralization” evident in the culture of the Silver Age. Here was an exaggerated sensibility, but also a conviction that artistic movement was the common denominator of all “great” works of art. This could take the form of physical movement, such as dance, rhythm, and gesture, or of abstract equivalents, such as poetical meter and music, which, for all the Symbolists, was the highest form of expression, the most intense and yet the most minimal material.

Even so, a characteristic of the Russian Symbolists was more recreative than experimental in nature, characterized by the aspiration to restore an esthetic unity to the disciplines through the rediscovery of a common philosophical and formal denominator. To this end, they often explored more than one medium simultaneously. In keeping with

A bastion of the Symbolist cause, the World of Art encompassed a multiplicity of artistic phenomena: the consumptive imagery of Aubrey Beardsley and the stylizations of the early Kandinsky; the Art Nouveau designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Elena Polenova (1850–98); and the Decadent verse of Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1866–1941). The World of Art fulfilled the practical function of propagating Russian art at home and abroad and of granting the Russian public access to the work of modern

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Improvisation V. by Vasily Kandinsky. The abstract works by Kandinsky can be traced to the symbolism of the Silver Age. © GEOFFREY CLEMENTS/CORBIS

Western artists through exhibitions and publications. The Russian Silver Age was not confined by strict geographical or social boundaries, for it also flowered—and perhaps more luxuriously—in Moscow and the provinces. Even Saratov, a small town to the south of Moscow, became a major center of Symbolist enquiry, thanks to the activities of the painter Borisov-Musatov, who, together


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with Vrubel, exerted a profound and permanent influence on the evolution of Russian Modernism. Impressed by Puvis de Chavannes and the Nabis during his residence in Paris, Borisov-Musatov incorporated their monumentalism and subdued palette into his elusive depictions of such wraithlike women as in Gobelin (1901, TG) and Reservoir (1902, TG). Evoking a gentler and more tranquil age, Borisov-Musatov shared the Symbolists’ desire to escape from their troubled time, and one of

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his central motifs, the “Eternal Feminine,” aligned him with poets such as Bely and Blok. Borisov-Musatov also established a short-lived but crucial school of painters, for he was the direct instigator of the “Blue Rose,” a movement which can be considered the real beginning of the avantgarde in Russian art. Apologists of Bely’s esthetics and Blok’s poetry, the Blue Rose artists, especially their leader, Pavel Kuznetsov (1878–1968), used a particular repertoire of symbols (blue-green foliage, fountains, and vestal maidens) in order to evoke the global orchestra that they heeded beyond the world of appearances. Concerned with the oblique and the intangible, they dematerialized nature and thereby heralded the radical concept of the picture as a self-sufficient, abstract unit. The Symbolist journals, Vesy (Scales,1904–1909 [last issues appeared only in 1910]), Iskusstvo (Art, 1905) and Zolotoe runo (Golden Fleece, 1906–1909 [last issues appeared only in 1910]), did much to promote their ideas and imagery. Reference to the Symbolist heritage helps to explain a number of subsequent developments in Russian art, especially the abstract investigations of Kandinsky and Malevich, for in many respects they expanded ideas supported by the Russian intelligentsia of the Silver Age. As Kandinsky explained in his major tract On the Spiritual in Art, the intuitive and the occult, not science, were the path to true illumination. Like the Symbolists, Kandinsky also felt that music could undermine the cult of objects and that the inner sound could be apprehended at moments of supersensitory or deviant perception. Similarly, Kandinsky was fascinated with the synthetic aspect of the esthetic experience and aspired to reintegrate the individual arts into a Gesamtkunstwerk. Reasons for this approach differed from person to person, although Benois, Diaghilev, and V. Ivanov agreed that Wagner was to be admired for the way in which he had combined narrative, musical, and visual forces in the operatic drama so as to produce an expressive whole. For Kandinsky, Wagner was a source of visual inspiration and, similarly, Skryabin’s efforts to draw distinct parallels between the seven colors of the spectrum and the seven notes of the diatonic scale prompted him to investigate the possibility of a total art.

tablishing a fragile alliance with a new generation of Moscow artists such as Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) and Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964). Praising the color and simplicity of Gauguin and Matisse, on the one hand, and the vitality of indigenous art forms, on the other, the “new barbarians” rejected Symbolist mystery in favor of the concrete and the material. Their first major exhibition, “The Jack of Diamonds” of 1910–1911, signaled the tarnishing of the Silver Age, for it showed the vulgar and the ugly, promoting graffiti, children’s drawings, and store signboards as genuine works of art instead of the impalpable visions of the astral plane and religious ecstasy. The destiny of the Russian Silver Age was both full and empty. On the one hand, the Symbolists left a positive construction, because some of their ideas and artifacts prefigured the linguistic and visual experiments of the avant-garde in the 1910s and 1920s, including the geometric reductions of Malevich known as Suprematism. Even the notion of a single and cohesive style joining architecture and the applied arts, promoted by the Constructivists in the wake of the October Revolution, can be viewed as outgrowths of the Symbolists’ concern with the total, organic work of art. On the other hand, if the Russian Symbolist poets and painters glimpsed beyond the veil, they rarely completed the voyage to the other shore. As they journeyed, they erred in bold transgressions and called for synthesis and synaesthesia as they sought a spiritual equilibrium for their uneasy era. Ultimately, if their fine antennae did pick up the celestial signals, the sound was so powerful that it caused a “dérèglement de tous les sens”—and not just metaphorically, but in the literal meaning of that phrase.

See also:

DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH; FUTURISM;

GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; KANDINSKY, VASILY VASILIEVICH BIBLIOGRAPHY

Even as he was writing On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky also pointed the way toward new esthetic criteria, for he emphasized the value of the primitive, the ethnographic, and the popular, es-

Bowlt, John E. (1982). The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early Twentieth Century and the “World of Art” Group. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Brumfield, William C. (1991). The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Berkeley: University of California Press . Elliott, David, ed. The Twilight of the Tsars: Russian Art at the Turn of the Century. Catalog of exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, March 7–May 19, 1991. Engelstein, Laura. (1992). The Keys to Happiness. Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Kandinsky, Vasily. (1946). On the Spiritual in Art. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

located to his sons as hereditary appanages. On April 26, 1353, Simeon died from the plague.

Proffer, Carl and Proffer, Ellendea, eds. (1975). The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.

See also: APPANAGE ERA; GRAND PRINCE; MOSCOW; MUSCOVY

Pyman, Avril. (1994). A History of Russian Symbolism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Richardson, William. (1986). “Zolotoe runo” and Russian Modernism. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis .

Fennell, John L. I. (1968). The Emergence of Moscow, 1304–1359. London: Secker and Warburg.

Rosenfeld, Alla, ed. (1999). Defining Russian Graphic Arts 1898–1934: From Diaghilev to Stalin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Martin, Janet. (1995). Medieval Russia, 980–1584. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. MARTIN DIMNIK

Salmond, Wendy, ed. The New Style: Russian Perceptions of Art Nouveau. Special issue of the journal Experiment 7 (2001). JOHN E. BOWLT

SIMONOV, KONSTANTIN MIKHAILOVICH (1915–1979), Russian writer and Writers’ Union official who specialized in describing the Great Patriotic War.

SIMEON (1316–1353), prince of Moscow and grand prince of Vladimir. Like his father Ivan I Danilovich “Moneybag,” Simeon Ivanovich (“the Proud”) collaborated with the Tatar overlords and secured a preferential status. After Ivan I died in 1340, Simeon and rival claimants visited the Golden Horde in Saray to solicit the patent for the grand princely throne. Khan Uzbek gave it to Simeon, who became the khan’s obedient vassal and was thus able to wield at least limited jurisdiction over rival princes. He also obtained the khan’s backing for his campaigns against Grand Prince Olgerd of Lithuania who, in the 1340s, increased his incursions into western Russia. Simeon waged war on Novgorod and forced it to recognize him as its prince and to pay Tatar tribute to him. With the help of Metropolitan Feognost he asserted greater control over the town than his father had done. During Simeon’s reign the principality of Suzdal–Nizhny Novgorod replaced Tver in the rivalry for supremacy with Moscow. Although the Tatars helped Simeon fight foreign enemies, after 1342 Khan Jani-Beg refused to help him become stronger than his rivals in northeast Russia. Specifically, he prevented Simeon from increasing the size of his domain and his power as grand prince. Simeon’s agreement with his brothers in the late 1340s alludes, for the first time, to the appanage system of Moscow. The document describes the relationship between the grand prince and his brothers and recognizes the domains that Ivan I al-


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Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov was born in Petrograd, the son of a military schoolteacher. He entered a factory school and began working in various factories while he began writing poetry. He published his first poems in 1934 and enrolled in the Gorky Literary Institute. After graduation in 1938, he worked as a journalist and served as a correspondent for Red Star (Krasnaya zvezda) during the war. During the war, he began to write plays and fiction about his experiences and became quite popular during the 1940s and 1950s. The novel Days and Nights described the battle of Stalingrad in a realistic, natural manner. His other work was noted for its adherence to dictates of Socialist Realism. He won numerous awards, including six Stalin prizes, a Lenin prize, and the Hero of Socialist Labor medal. Simonov served in many editorial and administrative positions during his career. He was editor-inchief of Literaturnaia Gazeta (1950–1953), a secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers (1946–1950, 1967–1969), a member of Central Committee of Communist Party (1952–1956), and a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Most interestingly, he was editor-in-chief of Novyi mir from 1954–1958, where he presided over the publication of Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone (Ne khlebom edinim). Under attack, he soon retreated from this liberal position and thereafter remained within the official bounds of propriety. In his posthumous memoirs, Through the Eyes of a Man from My Generation (Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia), Simonov provides great insight

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into the world of Soviet literary politics under Stalin and after. His life and work demonstrate the compromises some writers chose as they negotiated the contours of official Soviet culture.

tices, it typified many other Russian monasteries. Of the many famous people buried there, one of the better known is the nineteenth-century writer Ivan Aksakov.

See also:

See also:

JOURNALISM; NOVY MIR; WORLD WAR II

CAVES MONASTERY; KIRILL-BELOOZERO MO-

NASTERY; MONASTICISM; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SERGIUS, ST.; TRINITY ST. SERGIUS MONASTERY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Simonov, Konstantin. (1945) Days and Nights, tr. J. Barnes. New York: Simon and Schuster.

NICKOLAS LUPININ

Simonov, Konstantin. (1989). Always a Journalist. Moscow: Progress Press. KARL E. LOEWENSTEIN

SIMONOV MONASTERY The Simonov Monastery in Moscow was founded in 1370 by Fyodor, a disciple of Russia’s greatest and most influential medieval saint, Sergius. Over the centuries, the Simonov was to become one of the richest monasteries in Russia. Early twentieth century official church records place the Simonov in the top 10 percent based on wealth. The monastery had six major churches on its grounds. Among them were churches dedicated to The Tikhvin Icon of the Mother of God, to the Dormition of the Virgin, and to St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker. Many churches had attached side chapels (or side altars) as well. The Tikhvin Icon church had, for example, side chapels dedicated to Basil the Blessed, a famous holy fool; to the martyrs Valentina and Paraskeva; to St. Sergius; to Athanasius of Alexandria and the martyr Glykeria; and to saints Xenophont and Maria. This indicated a complex and intricate pattern of church structure, one that pertained to the larger, better endowed monasteries.

SINODIK The sinodik pravoslaviya corresponds to the synodicon adopted at the council of the Greek Orthodox Church in 843 that condemned the iconoclasts. By the twelfth century, the term also came to mean “memorial book.” The sinodik pravoslaviya contains the decisions of the seven ecumenical councils, the names of those under anathema, and a list of important persons who deserve “many years of life,” that is, to be remembered eternally. The text was read only once per year in the Orthodox rite, on the first Sunday of Lent. In addition to the Greek version, there are also more recent Georgian, Serbian, and Bulgarian versions. The Russian Primary Chronicle mentions a sinodik under the year 1108, but the Greek form was probably not replaced by a Russian translation until 1274. Starting around the end of the fourteenth century, the names of fallen warriors were also entered in the sinodik pravoslaviya. In 1763, the metropolitan of Rostov, Arseny Matseyvich, read aloud the anathema in the sinodik pravoslaviya on those who touch church property as a protest against Catherine II’s planned secularization of church landholdings.

During the War of 1812 the Simonov was looted by the Napoleonic armies when they entered a burning Moscow. However, it quickly regained its material well-being. Much of its income was derived from visitors, pilgrims, and donations. Land holdings outside Moscow generated income from the production and milling of grain. In these prac-

The word sinodik took on a second meaning in twelfth-century Novgorod and later in Muscovite Russia. In this second sense it refers to a memorial book, corresponding to the Greek Orthodox diptych, containing the names of dead persons who are to be commemorated in the daily liturgical cycle. Around the end of the fifteenth century, when the number of donors began to grow rapidly, Muscovite monasteries developed a system not found in other Orthodox countries: Donors’ names were entered in books organized around the size of the donation. So-called eternal sinodiki listed the names of donors who had given relatively modest gifts and were read throughout the day. “Daily lists”

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Two of the Simonov Monastery’s leading figures became patriarchs of the Russian Church. Job, who was appointed abbot of Simonov in 1571, was the first patriarch in Russia (1589). In 1642, Joseph, the archimandrite of the Simonov Monastery, was elected to the patriarchy.

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(the names vary) commemorated the donors of more substantial gifts and were read only at certain fixed points in the liturgical cycle. This segmented system flourished until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, and quite often in the seventeenth, sinodiki included “introductions” that detailed the importance and value of care for the deceased. Many Russian monasteries and churches still maintain sinodiki.

See also:

DONATION BOOKS; ORTHODOXY; PRIMARY

CHRONICLE; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

LUDWIG STEINDORFF

T R I A L

officer Slade, who brought news of the defeat to Constantinople. Ottoman losses totaled 15 ships and 3,000 men with the Russians taking 200 prisoners; on the Russian side, 37 were killed and 235 wounded. Osman Pasha, wounded in the engagement, was taken prisoner.

See also: MENSHIKOV, ALEXANDER DANILOVICH; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; NAKHIMOV, PAVEL STEPANOVICH; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS; TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daly, Robert Welter. (1958). “Russia’s Maritime Past,” In The Soviet Navy, ed. Malcolm George Saunders. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. JOHN C. K. DALY

SINO-SOVIET SPLIT See

SINOPE, BATTLE OF The battle of Sinope, fought on November 30, 1853, was the last major naval action between sailing ship fleets. The battle resulted from worsening relations between the Ottoman and Russian empires. For naval historians, the battle is notable for the first broad use of shell guns, marking the end of the use of smooth bore cannon that had previously been the primary naval weapon for nearly three centuries. In the spring of 1853 Tsar Nicholas’s emissary Admiral Alexander Menshikov broke off negotiations with the Ottoman Empire. Menshikov opposed plans for a preemptive strike against the Bosporus, and the Russian Black Sea Fleet subsequently prepared for a defensive war within the Black Sea. The Ottoman government ordered a squadron of Vice Admiral Osman Pasha to the Caucasus coast in early November 1853 in support of Ottoman ground forces, but bad weather forced the ships to seek shelter at Sinope. A Russian squadron under Vice Admiral Pavel Stepanovich Nakhimov on his flagship Imperatritsa Maria-60 decided to attack. Following a war council, Nakhimov ordered his officers in an evocation of Nelson at Trafalgar: “I grant you the authority to act according to your own best judgment, but I enjoin each to do his duty.” With six ships of the line and two frigates with 720 guns, Nakhimov attacked an Ottoman squadron of seven frigates, three corvettes, two steamers, two brigs, and two transports mounting 510 guns under shore defenses with 38 pieces of artillery. The shell guns proved lethal in Nakhimov’s two-columned assault; the only Ottoman vessel that managed to escape the carnage was the steam frigate Taif-20 carrying the British


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CHINA, RELATIONS WITH.

SINYAVSKY-DANIEL TRIAL In September 1965, Soviet authorities arrested a well-known literary critic, Andrei Sinyavsky, and a relatively obscure translator, Yuly Daniel, and charged them with slandering the Soviet system in works published abroad pseudonymously. The works in question were often satirical but in no sense anti-Soviet; in his essay On Socialist Realism, for example, Sinyavsky (or “Abram Tertz”) advocated nothing more radical than a return to the adventurous style of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Nonetheless, following a January 1966 press campaign of vicious denunciations, the pair was convicted at a show trial in February. Sinyavsky received seven years, and Daniel five, in a strict-regime labor camp. Conservative elements in the Leonid Brezhnev– Alexei Kosygin regime, determined to crack down on the intellectual experimentation of the Nikita Khrushchev years, presumably intended the affair as the signal of a stricter cultural line and as a warning to intellectuals to keep quiet. But the signal was ambiguous—the conservatives were not yet firmly in control—and the warning ineffectual. Sinyavsky and Daniel refused to play their assigned roles, pleading not guilty and defending themselves in court vigorously. A public Moscow protest against the arrests in December 1965 was followed by a petition campaign, an increase in open protest and samizdat, and, ultimately, the appearance of the Chronicle of Current Events in April 1968. In fact, the Sinyavsky-Daniel case is widely viewed as a

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spark that galvanized the dissident movement by raising the specter of a return to Stalinism and by convincing many intellectuals that it was futile to work within the system.

See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; SHOW TRIALS; THAW, THE

others) and as a narrative device present in most world literatures. Since the beginning of the 1980s and the rediscovery of Bakhtin’s work, his concept of skaz has served as a starting point for further debate: for instance, over whether the relationship between author and narrator is mutual and interactive.

See also:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hayward, Max, ed. and tr. (1967). On Trial: The Soviet State versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzhak,” revised and enlarged edition. New York and Evanston, IL: Harper & Row. JONATHAN D. WALLACE

SIXTH PARTY CONGRESS See

OCTOBER REVOLU-

TION.

BYLINA; LESKOV, NIKOLAI SEMENOVICH; BAKH-

TIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH; GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hodgson, Peter. (1983). “More on the Matter of Skaz: The Formalist Model.” In From Los Angeles to Kiev: Papers on the Occasion of the Ninth International Congress of Slavists, Kiev, September, 1983, ed. Vladimir Markov and Dean S. Worth. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers. Terras, Victor, ed. (1985). Handbook of Russian Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

SKAZ A literary term originally defined as “orientation toward oral speech” in prose fiction, can also indicate a type of oral folk narrative. Boris Eikhenbaum first described skaz, derived from the verb skazat (“to tell”), in a pair of 1918 articles as a kind of “oral” narration that included unmediated or improvisational aspects. Formalists and other critics developed this analytical tool during the 1920s, including Yuri Tynianov (1921), Viktor Vinogradov (1926), and Mikhail Bakhtin (1929). Tynianov analyzed the effect of skaz, arguing that it enabled the reader to enter the text, but did not really clarify the mechanism through which it worked. Vinogradov and Bakhtin helped refine the concept of skaz as a stylistic device. Vinogradov developed the idea that skaz comprised a series of signals that aroused in the reader a sense of speech produced by utterance, not writing. Bakhtin placed skaz within his own larger theory of narration, defining it as one kind of “double-voiced utterance” (the others being stylization and parody) in which two distinct voices—the author’s speech and another’s speech—were oriented toward one another within the same level of conceptual authority. The effect of oral speech is, therefore, not the primary characteristic of skaz for Bakhtin.

Titunik, I. R. (1977). “The Problem of Skaz (Critique and Theory).” In Papers in Slavic Philology, ed. Benjamin A. Stolz. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications. ELIZABETH JONES HEMENWAY

SKOBELEV, MIKHAIL DMITRIYEVICH (1843–1882), famous officer in the Russian imperial army active in the conquest of Turkestan and in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1888. Born to a Russian noble family, Mikhail Skobelev became a member of the officer corps of the Russian army. In 1869, having received an education in military schools, he joined Russian forces completing the conquest of Central Asia.

Since the 1920s skaz has been identified both as a distinctive characteristic of Russian literature (in the work of Gogol, Zamiatin, Zoshchenko, and

He first distinguished himself in military operations in the Fergana Valley (now in Uzbekistan), where in 1875 anti-Russian rebel forces had overthrown the khan of Kokand (allied with Russia). He quickly formulated his own strategy of colonial war, summed up in the guidelines “slaughter the enemy until resistance ends,” then “cease slaughter and be kind and humane to the defeated enemy.” He destroyed several rebel towns during his campaign, leaving thousands of dead among the rebels and the civilian population. When leaders of the revolt surrendered, he recommended to the tsar that they be pardoned. As a reward for his military triumph, he was promoted to the rank of major general and, at the age of thirty, became the military ruler of the Fergana Valley.

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When the Russian Empire declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1877, Skobelev joined the Russian armies moving against the Turks. His bravery and military skill earned him the command of one of the Russian armies in the campaign. He led his troops in the capture of the key Ottoman-fortified city along the western Black Sea coast protecting Constantinople. His desire for rapid victory resulted in heavy losses among his troops, but his exploits preserved his image in Russia as the triumphant “White General.” Skobelev’s final military triumph came in another war in Central Asia. Faced with the revolt of nomadic Turkmen tribes, the tsarist government sent him in 1880 to force the nomads to submit to imperial rule. He was successful, applying once again his brutal strategy of colonial warfare. In early 1881 his troops stormed the major Turkmen fortress of Geok-Tepe (now in Turkmenistan), slaughtering half of the defenders as well as many civilians. His reputation among Russian imperialists was at its peak. However, the new tsar, Alexander III, was suspicious of his desire for fame and his political ambitions. Following Skobelev’s triumph in Turkestan, the government sent him to a remote military post in western Russia. There he began a public campaign to restore his reputation, but died shortly afterward of a heart attack.

See also: CENTRAL ASIA; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; RUSSOTURKISH WARS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Meyer, Karl, and Brysac, Shareen. (1999). Tournament of Shadows: The Race for Empire and the Great Game in Central Asia. New York: Counterpoint Press. Rich, David. (1998). The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. DANIEL BROWER

SKRYPNYK, MYKOLA OLEKSYOVYCH

M Y K O L A

O L E K S Y O V Y C H

life of a professional revolutionary, organizing the Bolshevik underground in Saratov, Odessa, Kiev, and Moscow. During this period, Skrypnyk was arrested fifteen times and repeatedly exiled to Siberia, and spent more than a year in voluntary exile in Switzerland. During the October Revolution he was a prominent member of the Military Revolutionary Committee in Petrograd. In 1918, on the suggestion of Vladimir Lenin, Skrypnyk moved to Ukraine to counterbalance the Russian chauvinism of the local Bolshevik leadership. He served there as people’s commissar of labor and later as head of the People’s Secretariat, the first Soviet government in Ukraine, and in April 1918 he was instrumental in the creation of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. After the Bolsheviks were forced to withdraw from Ukraine by the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Skrypnyk joined the Cheka, but he returned to Ukraine when the Civil War ended. As people’s commissar of justice of the Ukrainian Republic (1922–1927), Skrypnyk helped to build a Soviet Ukrainian state and ensure its rights within the Soviet Union. Starting in 1923, when the Kremlin introduced the policy of nativization, he actively promoted the implementation of its Ukrainian incarnation or ukrainization. During his tenure as people’s commissar of education (1927–1933), he was active in ukrainizing the republic’s press, publishing, education, and culture. Although Skrypnyk remained an orthodox Bolshevik and an enemy of Ukrainian nationalism, he stood out as the Ukrainian leader who was most vocal in his opposition to Moscow’s centralism and great-power chauvinism. He also distinguished himself by engineering the standardization of Ukrainian orthography— the socalled Skrypnykivka system (1927)—and founding the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism (1928). In 1933, when Josef Stalin condemned his ukrainization policies as nationalistic, Skrypnyk committed suicide. He was rehabilitated in the mid-1950s, and in post-Soviet Ukraine he is respected as a defender of Ukrainian culture and sovereignty.

See also:

BOLSHEVISM; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET

UNION; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

(1872–1933), Ukrainian Bolshevik leader and advocate of ukrainization. Born in Ukraine, Mykola Skrypnyk joined the revolutionary movement in 1901 as a student at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, from which he never graduated. Until 1917 he lived the


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mace, James. (1983). Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918–1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

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Martin, Terry. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. SERHY YEKELCHYK

SLAVERY Slavery in one form or another has been a central feature of East Slavic and Russian history from at least the very beginning almost to the present day. Its presence and its offshoots have lent a particular coloration to Russian civilization that can be found in few other places. One common social science definition of slavery is that the slave is an outsider; namely, that he or she is of a different race, religion, caste, or tribe than that of his or her owner. In cases where that was not true, slaveholders resorted to fiction, which made the slave (usually an infant abandoned by its parents) appear to be an outsider. Or a slave might be a lawbreaker who by his crime had placed himself outside of society: one who, in Orlando Patterson’s phrase, was “socially dead.” This could include debtors, who were regarded as thieves because they could not or would not repay borrowed money or goods, or criminals who could not pay fines. Russia included such outsiders as slaves, but (along with Korea) also enslaved its own people. This was unusual and made Russian slavery distinctive. Because of its atypical nature, some people have questioned whether Russian rabstvo and especially kholopstvo were in fact “really slavery.” However, a thoughtful examination indicates that all such individuals in fact were slaves. All varieties of slaves were treated equally under the law.

indentured laborer could be sold into slavery as recompense for crimes. As in all slave systems, the owner was responsible for a slave’s offenses, much as an owner is responsible for his dog. The heyday of medieval Russian slavery followed the collapse of political unity after 1132, and each of the dozen or so independent principalities waged civil war against each other as well as the steppe nomads and neighboring sedentary peoples to the west. As always—until probably the 1880s—Russia was a labor-short country, so those desiring extra hands often enslaved them. Much of twelfth-century farming was done by slaves living in barracks. The Mongol invasion and conquest made the situation worse. The Mongols enslaved skilled individuals and dispatched them to Karakorum, Sarai, and other corners of the earth. The dozen or so principalities of Rus in 1237 fragmented into fifty, perhaps even one hundred—each enslaving the labor of other principalities. Many of these slaves were shipped to Novgorod, whose famous slave market was at the busy intersection of Slave and High Streets, where professional readers and writers set up their business composing and reading for customers the famous birch-bark letters. Slaves from Novgorod were shipped into the Baltic, to England, to other Atlantic countries, and into the Islamic lands of the Mediterranean.

From the dawn of Russian history, as everywhere else on Earth at the time, slaves were typically products of warfare—East Slavic tribes fighting with each other or with neighboring Turkic, Iranian, Finnic, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish, Germanic, and other peoples. Such victims were true outsiders who could be either enslaved in Rus itself or taken abroad into the international slave trade. Slaves were mentioned in every Russian law code. As the earliest such code, the Russkaia pravda, grew in size from its earliest redaction compiled in about 1016 to its full size, the so-called Expanded Pravda a special section on slavery was added. It enumerated some of the avenues into slavery, such as sale of prior slaves, self-sale, becoming a steward, and marriage of a free person to a slave. An

While the unification of the East Slavic lands by Moscow put an end to the capture of other East Slavs into slavery, Russia was still short of labor, and the appetite for slaves did not decline. In Kievan Rus the Orthodox Church had provided charity, but this diminished with the rise of Moscow. In order for the impoverished to survive, the practice began to develop of those in need selling themselves into what was described as “full slavery.” This was a form of perpetual, lifelong slavery in which offspring were described as hereditary slaves. Most societies could not withstand the tension inherent in enslaving their own people, but this did not seem to bother the Russians. From the outset Russian society had consisted not only of East Slavs, but also the ruling Varangian/Viking element, conquered indigenous Iranians, Finns, and Balts, plus any Turkic, Mongol, or other people who wanted to live in Rus. There were no barriers to intermarriage among these peoples, and the sole distinction came to be (perhaps after 1350, or even the 1650s) those who allegedly were Orthodox Christians and those who were not. Thus the insider-outsider dichotomy was weakly developed, and this perhaps permitted Russians to enslave their own people.

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Russian Slave Life by Sergei Vladimirovich Ivanov. © SUPERSTOCK

In the sixteenth century full slavery came to be replaced by what is best translated as limited service contract slavery (kabalnoye kholopstvo), known elsewhere (in Parthia) as antichresis. It worked as follows: A person in need or who did not desire to control his own life found a person who would buy him. (Two-thirds of the cases involved primarily young males, the other third females.) They agreed on a price; the slave took the money from his buyer and agreed to work for him for a year in lieu of paying the interest on the money. If he did not repay the loan (or a third person—presumably another buyer—did not repay it for him), he defaulted and became a full slave. By the 1590s there were many such slaves. Serfdom was in full development, and the slave had the advantage that he had to pay no taxes, whereas the serf did. Slavery was becoming so popular that the powerful government unilaterally changed the terms of limited service contract slavery: The limitation was changed from the one year of the loan to the life of the person giving the loan. There was a dual expropriation here: The person taking the loan (i.e., selling himself) could no longer pay it off, and the person


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granting the loan (i.e., buying the slave) could not pass the slave to his heirs. This became the premier form of slavery until the demise of the institution in the 1720s. Two changes were introduced: in the 1620s a maximum price of two rubles, and in the 1630s an increase of the maximum to three rubles. This meant that some would-be slaves could find no buyer because their price was too high, whereas others were forced to sell themselves for less than their “market price” would have been without the price controls. Regardless, slavery introduced a form of dependency such that those who were manumitted almost always resold themselves upon the death of the owner, often to the deceased owner’s heirs. About 10 percent of the entire population were slaves. Russia was the sole country in the world with a central office (the Slavery Chancellery) in the capital controlling the institution of slavery. All slaves had to be registered. In the 1590s a reregistration of all slaves was required, in which about half of all slaves were limited service contract slaves and the others were of half a dozen other varieties. There were military captives, subject to return

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home upon the signing of a peace treaty with the enemy belligerent. There were debt slaves, who had defaulted on a loan which could be “worked off” at the rate of 5 rubles per year by an adult male, 2.50 rubles per year by an adult female, and 2 rubles per year by a child over ten. There were indentured slaves, who agreed to work for a term in exchange for cash, training, and often a promise that the owner would marry them off before the end of the term. Those who married slaves were themselves enslaved, as were those who worked for someone else for over three months. There were hereditary slaves, those born to slaves and their offspring. The very complex practices of the Slavery Chancellery were codified into chapter 20 (119 articles) of the Law Code of 1649. Slavery had a profound impact on the institution of serfdom which borrowed norms from slavery. Farming slaves were converted into taxpaying serfs in 1679. Household slaves (the vast majority of all slaves) were converted into house serfs by the poll tax in 1721. After 1721 serfdom increasingly took on the appearance of slavery until 1861.

See also:

BIRCHBARK CHARTERS; EMANCIPATION ACT; EN-

SERFMENT; FEUDALISM; GOLDEN HORDE; KIEVAN RUS; LABOR; LAW CODE OF 1649; MUSCOVY SERFDOM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hellie, Richard. (1982). Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hellie, Richard, ed. and tr. (1988). The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks. Patterson, Orlando. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. RICHARD HELLIE

SLAVO-GRECO-LATIN ACADEMY

lines of the curriculum and formal structure of contemporary Jesuit colleges. The Leichoudes divided the curriculum into two parts: The first part included grammar, poetics and rhetoric; the second comprised philosophy (including logic) and theology. The grammar classes were divided into three levels: elementary, middle, and higher. The middle and higher levels were themselves divided into sublevels. Instruction was in Greek and Latin, with an attached school that provided basic literacy in Church Slavonic. The Leichoudes authored their own textbooks, largely adapted from contemporary Jesuit manuals. As in Jesuit colleges, the method of instruction included direct exposure to ancient Greek and Latin literary and philosophical texts, as well as an abundance of practical exercises. Student work included memorization, competitive exercises, declamations, and disputations, as well as parsing and theme writing. On important feast days, students exhibited their skills and knowledge in orations before the Patriarch of Moscow or royal and aristocratic individuals. Students were both clergy and laymen, and came from various social and ethnic backgrounds, from some of Russia’s top princely scions and members of the Patriarch’s court, down to children of lowly servants in monasteries, and included Greeks and even a baptized Tatar. Several of these students made their careers in important diplomatic, administrative, and ecclesiastical positions during Peter I’s reign. In 1701 the Academy was reorganized by decree of Tsar Peter I and staffed with Ukrainian and Belorussian teachers educated at the Kiev Mohylan Academy. Until the end of Peter’s reign, the student body betrays a slight “plebeianization”: Fewer members of the top aristocratic families attended classes there. In addition, many more of the students were clergymen. The curriculum retained the same scholastic content, but the language of instruction now was exclusively Latin.

Titled in its first fifty years variously as “Greek School,” “Ancient and Modern Greek School,” “Greco-Slavic School,” “Slavo-Latin School,” and “Greco-Latin School,” the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy was the first formal educational institution in Russian history. Established in 1685, the Academy became the breeding ground for many secular and ecclesiastical collaborators of Tsar Peter I. Its founders and first teachers were the Greek brothers Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. From its inception, the Academy followed the well-established

Reorganized in 1775 under the supervision of Metropolitan Platon of Moscow (in office, 1775–1812), the Academy expanded its curriculum to offer classes in church history, canon law, Greek, and Hebrew. Finally, in 1814, the Academy was transferred to the Trinity St. Sergius Monastery and was restructured into the Moscow Theological Seminary.

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EDUCATION; LEICHOUDES, IOANNIKIOS AND

SOPHRONIOS; PETER I; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

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Chrissidis, Nikolaos A. (2000). “Creating the New Educated Elite: Learning and Faith in Moscow’s Slavo-GrecoLatin Academy, 1685–1694.” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, CT. NIKOLAOS A. CHRISSIDIS

increasingly nationalistic, many ardently supporting Panslavism after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1854–1856). However, these thinkers were not united, except insofar as they were radically opposed to the Westerners, and individually their ideas differed. CLASSICAL SLAVOPHILISM

SLAVOPHILES The origins of Slavophilism can be traced back to the ideas of thinkers such as Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, Alexander Radishchev, Poshkov, Nikolai Novikov, and Nikolai Karamzin, all of whom contrasted ancient pre-Petrine Russia with the modern post-Petrine embodiment, stressing the uniqueness of Russian traditions, norms, and ideas. Most exponents of this school of thought were of noble birth, and many held government posts, so they were quite familiar with the workings of the tsarist autocracy. They were prominent during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855) and emerged after the Decembrist uprising of 1825 and the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Peter Chaadayev’s (1794–1856) ideas in the Philosophical Letter (1836) and other works acted as a catalyst for the emergence of Slavophile ideology. Chaadayev gave special emphasis to the need for Russia to link up with Europe and the Roman Catholic Church. His views on religion, nationality, tradition, and culture stimulated the famous Slavophile-Westerner debate. Building on Chaadayev’s legacy, the Slavophiles developed three main beliefs: samobytnost (originality), the importance of the Orthodox Church, and a rejection of the ideas of Peter the Great and his followers. In addition, they promoted respect for the rule of law, opposed any restriction on the powers of the tsar, and advocated freedom of the individual in terms of speech, thought, and conduct. The Slavophiles believed that Russian civilization was unique and superior to Western culture because it was based on such institutions as the Orthodox Church, the village community, or mir, and the ancient popular assembly, the zemsky sobor. They supported the idea of autocracy and opposed political participation, but some also favored the emancipation of serfs and freedom of speech and press. Alexander II’s reforms achieved some of these goals. Over time, however, some Slavophiles became


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The Slavophiles, by and large, can be grouped into three categories: classical, moderate, and radical. Like their opponents, the Westerners, they had a particular view of Russia’s history, language, and culture and hence a certain vision of Russia’s future, especially its relations with the West. Perhaps their greatest concern, from the 1830s onwards, was that Russia might follow the Western road of development. They were vehemently opposed to this, arguing that Russia must return to its own roots and draw upon its own strengths. Most Slavophiles opposed the reforms introduced by Peter the Great on the grounds that they had destroyed Russian tradition by allowing alien Western ideas (such as the French and German languages) to be imported into Russia. They also maintained that Russia had paid too high a price to become a major European power, namely, moral degradation. Furthermore, the bureaucracy established by Peter the Great was a source of moral corruption, because the Table of Ranks stimulated personal ambition and subordinated the nobility to the bureaucracy. These views were in many ways shaped by the social and political conditions that prevailed during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855). In general, the Slavophiles saw the Westward swing as a threat to the church, the peasant and village community, and other Russian institutions. Many classical Slavophiles were initially influenced by Nicholas I’s Official Nationality slogan: “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality.” The most important proponent of classical Slavophilism was Ivan Kireyevsky (1806–1856), who could read French and German, had traveled in Russia,. and understood the importance of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835). Kireyevsky rejected the main intellectual developments of the time (rationalism, secularism, the industrial revolution, liberalism) and argued that Russia, as a backward young nation, was not in a position to imitate a civilized Europe. He pointed, for example, to the differences in religion (Catholicism versus Orthodox Christianity) and to the fact that Russian society consisted of small peasant communes founded upon common land tenure. Like

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Kireyevsky, Alexei Khomiakov (1804–1860) also warned against blindly following the West and criticized the impending emancipation of the serfs (1861). He emphasized spiritual freedom (sobornost) and Russia’s unique historical mission. Whereas the West was built upon coercion and slavery, he said, Russia was founded and maintained by consent, freedom, and peace. Yuri A. Samarin (1819–1879) supported Khomiakov’s view, arguing that society, if left to its own devices, would be torn apart by division and conflict because individualism only promoted selfishness and isolation, and thus a strong centralized state and leader were needed to maintain order. This was a clear reference to the danger that Russia would see a rerun of the Revolutions of 1848. As he saw it, chaos would ensue if Russia followed the example of Western liberalism by introducing constitutionalism and a system of checks and balances. Other proponents included the Aksakov brothers, Ivan and Konstantin. Ivan, at the height of his influence in the late 1870s, favored the liberation of the Balkan Slavs, whereas Konstantin advocated the emancipation of the serfs and was a proponent of the village commune (mir). Both wanted to preserve Russian traditions and maintain the ties between the Slavic peoples. In Ivan Aksakov in particular, one sees clear evidence of the emergence of Panslavism, which advocated the political and cultural unity of the Slavic peoples.

MODERATE AND RADICAL SLAVOPHILISM

Classical Slavophilism eventually gave way to two other variants of the doctrine. The moderate wing of the Slavophile movement is associated with Mikhail P. Pogodin (1800–1875) and Fyodor I. Tyutchev (1808–1873). Pogodin, a historian and publisher whose conservative journal The Muscovite (1841–1856) defended the policies of Nicholas I, was professor of Russian history at Moscow University (1835–1844) and wrote a history of Russia (7 vols., 1846–1857) and a study of the origins of Russia (3 vols., 1871). Tyutchev was a lyric poet and essayist who spent most of his life (1822–1844) abroad in the diplomatic service and later wrote poetry of a nationalist and Panslavist orientation.

aims only received limited government support, Panslavism became stronger than ever in the postNapoleonic period and especially after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, as Prussia tried to assimilate the Slavs, the Slavophiles called for solidarity against foreign oppression, and with this goal in mind many advocated the establishment of a federation. This was necessary, in Danilevsky’s view, in order to protect all Slavs from European expansion in the east. The Russian government in the 1870s used these ideas to justify russification and an increasingly expansionist policy. All in all, with the advance of Russian liberalism and constitutionalism at the end of the nineteenth century, the Panslavists tried to distance themselves from the classical and moderate Slavophiles. THE SLAVOPHILE LEGACY

The demise of Slavophilism in the nineteenth century was primarily due to the widespread divisions between those favoring conservative reform and those advocating a more extremist Panslavism. Like the populists, many Slavophiles argued that Nicholas I was incapable of reform, as shown by his repressive reign, and thus a more nationalist stance was needed. Between the Russian Revolution and the rise of Josef Stalin, this ideology was largely rejected by the Soviet regime, but following the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Panslavism was revived, and it became very prominent during World War II. In the late Soviet period and especially in the postcommunist era, the Slavophile ideology was once again promoted by Vladimir Zhirinovsky and other nationalists who sought to put Russia first and to protect it against a hostile West. Many neoSlavophiles wished to see the restoration of the USSR and the Soviet Empire, and a return to Orthodoxy. Thus the legacy of the Slavophiles remains important and influential in contemporary Russia.

See also:

MIR; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; NATION

AND NATIONALITY; PANSLAVISM; NICHOLAS I; PETER I; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; RUSSIFICATION; TABLE OF RANKS; WESTERNIZERS

The radical wing of slavophilism was epitomized by Nikolai Y. Danilevsky (1828–1855). As outlined in his Russia and Europe (1869), Danilevsky’s aim was to unite all the countries and peoples who spoke Slavic languages on the grounds that they possessed common cultural, economic, and political goals. Whereas in the seventeenth century such

Devlin, Judith. (1999). Slavophiles and Commissars: Enemies of Democracy in Modern Russia. London: Macmillan.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walicki, Andrei. (1975). The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century

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Russian Thought, tr. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Williams, Christopher, and Hanson, Stephen E. (1999). “National Socialism, Left Patriotism or Superimperialism? The Radical Right in Russia.” In The Radical Right in East-Central Europe, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet. University Park: Penn State University Press.

tion of his society from youthful idealism through terrible trials to decline and imminent fall. He created a distinctive poetic language, purged of conventional poetic ornament, that has been highly influential. His prose memoirs about his military service, equally plain and unconventional, were only published fifty years after the end of the war.

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

See also: THAW, THE; UNION OF SOVIET WRITERS; WORLD WAR II BIBLIOGRAPHY

SLUTSKY, BORIS ABROMOVICH (1919–1986), Russian poet and memoirist. Brought up in Kharkov, Boris Abramovich Slutsky moved to Moscow in 1937 to study law and soon began a simultaneous literature course. On the outbreak of World War II he volunteered and went into battle as an infantry officer. Soon wounded in action, he spent the remainder of the war as a political officer, joining the Party in 1943. He ended up as a highly decorated Guards major, having campaigned all the way to Austria. In 1945 he returned to Moscow and after convalescence made a living writing radio scripts, but in 1948 he was deprived of this work because of his Jewish origin. Sponsored by Ilya Erenburg, he was accepted in the Union of Writers in 1957 and thereafter was a professional poet. He made a lasting reputation with unprecedentedly unheroic poems about the war, but he was soon upstaged by the more flamboyant younger poets of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, poets more concerned with the future than with the past. Slutsky steadily continued publishing original poetry and also translations, until on the death of his wife in 1977 at which point he suffered a mental collapse, which was underlain by the lingering effects of his wounds. Thereafter he was silent. From the beginning of his career Slutsky acquiesced in the censoring of his work, never moving into dissidence; notoriously, in 1958 he spoke and voted for the expulsion of Pasternak from the Union of Writers, an action for which he privately never forgave himself. After Slutsky’s death, it was found that well over half of his poetry had never been published. The appearance of this suppressed work in the decade after he died revealed that Slutsky had been by far the most important poet of his generation. In hundreds of short lyrics he had chronicled his life and times, paying attention to everything from high politics to the routines of everyday life and tracing the evolu-


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Slutsky, Boris. (1999). Things That Happened, ed. and tr. G. S. Smith. Glas (Moscow, Russia), English; v. 19. Moscow, GLAS; Chicago: Ivan Dee. GERALD SMITH

SLUTSKY, YEVGENY YEVGENIEVICH (1880–1948), mathematical statistician and economist. The most profoundly original of all Russian contributors to economic theory, Yevgeny Slutsky was born in Yaroslavl and studied mathematics in Ukraine. His first major publications were in the field of statistics and on the importance of cooperatives. In 1915 he published a seminal article on the theory of consumer behavior. This demonstrated how the consequence of a price change on the quantity of a good demanded could lead to a residual variation in demand, even with a compensating increase in income. John Hicks rediscovered this work in the West in the 1930s, naming the Slutsky equation the “Fundamental Equation of Value Theory.” After 1917 Slutsky worked on analyzing the effects of paper currency emission, on the axiomatic foundations of probability theory, and on the theory of stochastic processes. This yielded a new conception of the stochastic limit. As a consequence, in 1925 Nikolai Kondratiev asked Slutsky to join the Conjuncture Institute in Moscow, for which he wrote his groundbreaking paper on the random generation of business cycles. This opened up a new avenue of cycle research by hypothesizing that the summation of mutually independent chance factors could generate the appearance of periodicity in a random series. In the 1920s Slutsky also worked on the praxeological foundations of economics, but with the closure of the Conjuncture Institute in 1930, he turned back to statistics. He subsequently worked in the Central

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Institute of Meteorology, in Moscow University, and in the Steklov Mathematical Institute. Here Slutsky computed the functions of variables, which led to the posthumous publication of tables for the incomplete Gamma-function and the chi-squared probability distribution. He died of natural causes in 1948.

See also:

KONDRATIEV, NIKOLAI DMITRIEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, R. G. D. (1950). “The Work of Eugen Slutsky.” Econometrica 18:209–216. Slutsky, E. E. (1937). “The Summation of Random Causes as the Source of Cyclic Processes.” Econometrica 5:105–146. Slutsky, E. E. (1953). “On the Theory of the Budget of the Consumer.” In American Economic Association, Readings in Price Theory. London: Allen & Unwin. VINCENT BARNETT

SMOLENSK ARCHIVE The Smolensk Archive comprises the Smolensk regional records of the All-Union Communist Party from the October Revolution in 1917 to the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. The German Army captured the Smolensk Archive when it invaded Russia in 1941 and in 1943 moved the contents to Vilnius. They were subsequently recovered by the Soviet authorities in Silesia in March 1946. American intelligence officers removed the files to a restitution center near Frankfurt am Main in 1946. The archive contains the incomplete and fragmentary records of the Smolensk and Western Oblast (regional) committees (obkom). These include the minutes of meetings, resolutions, decisions, and directives made by Communist Party officials, as well as details on Party work relating to agriculture, especially collectivization policy, machine tractor stations, trade unions, industry, armed forces, censorship, education, women, the control commission, and the purges. The archive also contains secret police, procuracy, court, and militia reports as well as private and personal files and the miscellaneous records of the city (gorkom) and district (raikom) committees. Between 5 and 10 percent of the archive does not pertain to Smolensk, but comprises material seized by the Germans in other parts

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of the USSR. The originals of these documents were presented to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Pursuant to an agreement made at the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era assets, the United States returned most of the archive to Russia on in December 2002. The archives were especially important to Western scholars because they provided an insider’s perspective on many historical developments that would otherwise have been unavailable in the era before Mikhail Gorbachev raised the restrictions on access to Soviet archival materials.

See also:

ARCHIVES; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET

UNION BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fainsod, Merle. (1958). Smolensk under Soviet Rule. London: Macmillan. Getty, J. Arch. (1999). Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–38. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. (1995). “The Odyssey of the ‘Smolensk Archive’: Plundered Communist Records for the Service of Communism.” In Carl Beck Occasional Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 1201. Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh. National Archives and Records Service. (1980). Guide to the Records of the Smolensk Oblast of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1917–41. Washington, DC: Author. CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

SMOLENSK WAR This unsuccessful campaign to recover the western border regions lost to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the Time Of Troubles marked Muscovy’s first major experiment with the new Western European infantry organization and line tactics. The Treaty of Deulino (1618) ended the Polish military intervention exploiting Muscovy’s Time Of Troubles and established a fourteen-year armistice between Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But it came at a high price for the Muscovites: the cession to the Commonwealth of most of the western border regions of Smolensk, Chernigov, and Seversk. This was a vast territory, running from the southeastern border of Livonia to just beyond the Desna River in northeastern


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Ukraine. It held more than thirty fortress towns, the most strategic of which was Smolensk, the largest and most formidable of all Muscovite fortresses and guardian of the principal western roads to Moscow. Upon his return from Polish captivity in 1619, Patriarch Filaret, father of Tsar Mikhail, made a new campaign to recover Smolensk, Chernigov, and Seversk from the Poles the primary objective of Muscovite foreign policy. Most of the diplomatic preconditions for such a revanche appeared to be in place by 1630, and by this point the Muscovite government had succeeded in restoring its central chancellery apparatus and fiscal system. It was now able to undertake a massive reorganization and modernization of its army for the approaching war with the Commonwealth. It imported Swedish, Dutch, and English arms to the cost of at least 50,000 rubles; it offered large bounties to recruit Western European mercenary officers experienced in the new infantry organization and line tactics; and it set these mercenary officers to work forming and training New-Formation Regiments—six regiments of Western style infantrymen (soldaty), a regiment of heavy cavalry (reitary), and a regiment of dragoons (draguny). These regiments were drilled in the new European tactics and outfitted and salaried at treasury expense, unlike the old Pomestie-based cavalry army. The New Formation infantry and cavalry would comprise a little more than half of the 33,000-man expeditionary army on the upcoming Smolensk campaign. Muscovy had never before experimented with New Formation units on such a scale. The death of Polish King Sigismund III in April 1632 led to an interregnum in the Commonwealth and factional struggle in the Diet. Patriarch Filaret took advantage of this confusion to send generals M. B. Shein and A. V. Izmailov against Smolensk with the main corps of the Muscovite field army. By October, Shein and Izmailov had captured more than twenty towns and had placed the fortress of Smolensk under siege. The Polish-Lithuanian garrison holding Smolensk numbered only about two thousand men, and the nearest Commonwealth forces in the region (those of Radziwill and Gonsiewski) did not exceed six thousand. But the besieging Muscovite army suffered logistical problems and desertions; their earthworks did not completely encircle Smolensk and did not offer enough protection from attack from the rear. Meanwhile the international coalition against the Commonwealth began to unravel, with the result that in August 1633, Wladyslaw IV, newly elected King


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of Poland, arrived in Shein’s and Izmailov’s rear with a Polish relief army of 23,000 and placed the Muscovite besiegers under his own siege. In January 1634 Shein and Izmailov were forced to sue for armistice in order to evacuate what was left of their army. They had to leave their artillery and stores behind. On their return to Moscow, Shein and Izmailov were charged with treason and executed. By the terms of the Treaty of Polianovka (May 1634) the Poles received an indemnity of twenty thousand rubles and were given back all the captured towns save Serpeisk. The next opportunity for Muscovy to regain Smolensk, Seversk, and Chernigov came a full twenty years later when Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the Ukrainian cossacks sought Tsar Alexei’s support for their war for independence from the Commonwealth.

See also:

FILARET ROMANOV, METROPOLITAN; NEW-

FORMATION REGIMENTS; POLAND; THIRTEEN YEARS’ WAR BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fuller, William C., Jr. (1992). Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914. New York: Free Press. BRIAN DAVIES

SMOLNY INSTITUTE Catherine II (the Great) founded the Smolny Institute for Girls, officially the Society for the Upbringing of Noble Girls, in 1764. Its popular name comes from its site in the Smolny Monastery on the left bank of the Neva River in St. Petersburg. Inspired by Saint-Cyr, a boarding school for girls in France, Smolny was part of Catherine’s educational plan to raise cultured, industrious, and loyal subjects. Ivan Betskoy, the head of this reform effort, was heavily influenced by Enlightenment theorists. Drawing on the ideas of John Locke and JeanJacques Rousseau, Betskoy’s pedagogical plan for Smolny emphasized moral education and the importance of environment. Girls lived at Smolny continuously from age five to eighteen without visits home, which were deemed corrupting. As at all-male schools such as the Corps of Cadets and the Academy of Arts, Smolny stressed training in the fine arts, especially dance and drama. The curriculum also included reading, writing, foreign languages,

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physics, chemistry, geography, mathematics, history, Orthodoxy, needlepoint, and home economics. The range of subjects led Voltaire to declare Smolny superior to Saint-Cyr. In 1765, a division with a less extensive curriculum was added for the daughters of merchants and soldiers. Catherine held public exams and performances of plays at Smolny, and took her favorite pupils on promenades in the Summer Gardens. Portraits of these favorites were commissioned from the painter Dmitry Levitsky. Smolny also became a stop for visiting foreign dignitaries. Its graduates were known for their manners and talents and were considered highly desirable brides. Some became teachers at the school, and a few were promoted to ladies-in-waiting at court. Peter Zavadovsky, who directed Catherine’s commission to establish a national school system, succeeded Betskoy as de facto head of Smolny in 1783. He replaced French with Russian as the school’s primary language and altered the curriculum to emphasize the girls’ future roles as wives and mothers. After Catherine’s death in 1796, Maria Fedorovna took over the institute and made changes that set Smolny’s course for the rest of its existence. The school’s administration became less personal and more bureaucratic. The age of admittance was changed from five to eight, in recognition of the importance of mothering during the early years of a child’s life, and the rules forbidding visits home were relaxed. Throughout the nineteenth century, Smolny maintained its reputation as the most elite educational institution for girls. Its name was regarded as synonymous with high cultural standards, manners, and poise, although sometimes its graduates were considered naive and ill-prepared for life outside of Smolny. The many references to Smolny in the Russian literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attest to the school’s cultural significance. In October 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks appropriated the Smolny Institute and made it their headquarters until March 1918. Since then, the Smolny campus has continued to be used for governmental purposes, eventually becoming home to the St. Petersburg Duma. Several rooms have been preserved as a museum of the institute’s past.

See also: CATHERINE II; EDUCATION; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF; ST. PETERSBURG

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Black, Joseph L. (1979). Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators, and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth Century Russia. New York: Columbia University Press. Nash, Carol. (1981). “Educating New Mothers: Women and the Enlightenment in Russia.” History of Education Quarterly 21:305–306. ANNA KUXHAUSEN

SMYCHKA Smychka, meaning “alliance” or “union” in Russian, was used during the New Economic Policy (NEP), particularly by those Bolsheviks who supported a moderate policy toward the peasantry, to describe a cooperative relationship between workers and peasants. In 1917 the revolutionary alliance of proletariat and peasantry against the tsarist ruling classes led to victory, but by the end of the Civil War the smychka had been severely weakened by harsh War Communism policies of forcible confiscation of grain. Vladimir Lenin introduced the NEP in 1921 to restore the smychka, ending confiscatory policies toward the peasantry and allowing limited private enterprise. The Bolsheviks were in the awkward position of claiming to represent the proletariat but actually ruling over a peasant population that they regarded as potentially bourgeois. In the 1920s they debated what policies should be applied to the peasantry, that is, what the smychka should mean. In his last writings, particularly “On Cooperation” and “Better Fewer, But Better” (both 1923), Lenin argued that the smychka meant gaining the peasants’ trust by recognizing and meeting their needs. Through cooperatives, he said, the vast majority of peasants could be gradually won over to socialism. Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and others members of the right built their program of gradual evolution to socialism on Lenin’s last writings, seeing the smychka as a permanent feature of Soviet life and calling for concessions to the peasantry. The left feared that the peasant majority could swallow the revolution and resisted concessions, hoping that rapid industrialization would end the need for alliance with the peasantry. The inherent tensions between Bolshevik goals and peasant needs threatened to rupture the smychka. In the 1923 Scissors Crisis, prices for agri-


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cultural products plummeted at the same time that those of state-produced manufactured goods rose sharply, opening a price gap that discouraged peasants from marketing agricultural products. Adjustments kept the smychka in place, and 1925 was the high point of pro-peasant policies. The Grain Crisis of 1928 and subsequent defeat of the right weakened the smychka, and the massive collectivization drive of 1929–1930 ended it completely.

See also: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; GRAIN CRISIS OF 1928; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; SCISSORS CRISIS; WAR COMMUNISM BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen, Stephen F. (1971). Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. New York: Random House. Lewin, Moshe. (1968). Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. CAROL GAYLE WILLIAM MOSKOFF

SOBCHAK, ANATOLY ALEXANDROVICH (1937–2000), law professor; mayor of St. Petersburg. Anatoly Sobchak was one of the leading liberal politicians of the perestroika era. Born in Chita, he completed a law degree at Leningrad State University in 1959. He settled permanently in Leningrad in1962 and joined the faculty of Leningrad State University in 1973, heading the economic law institute and rising to be dean. Unusually for so senior an academic, Sobchak was for many years not a member of the Communist Party. He only joined during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, becoming a candidate member in May 1987, and a full member in June 1988. The next year he was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, where he became a leader of the Inter-Regional Deputies group and chaired the committee investigating the massacre of demonstrators by Soviet troops in Tiflis in April 1989. A loyal supporter of Boris Yeltsin, Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad in June 1991, the same day that a referendum approved changing the city’s name to St. Petersburg. He opposed the August 1991 coup attempt and persuaded the army not to deploy troops in the city. Sobchak presided over the liberalization of the city’s economy, whose many defense plants had suffered greatly from the Soviet


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Russian politician Anatoly Sobchak was a mentor to President Vladimir Putin. © VITTORIANO RASTELLI/CORBIS

economic collapse. On the recommendation of the rector of Leningrad State University, Stanislav Merkouriev, Sobchak hired a young ex-KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, to handle relations with foreign investors. Putin had been a student in one of Sobchak’s classes but they were not personally acquainted. Putin became Sobchak’s deputy in 1993 and ran his re-election campaign in July 1996. Sobchak, surprisingly, lost to a challenge from his former deputy, Vladimir Yakovlev. The next year Yakovlev (known as governor rather than mayor) filed a libel suit against Sobchak after the latter accused him of ties to organized crime in a newspaper interview. In October 1997 Sobchak suffered a heart attack while being questioned by police about corruption allegations, mainly pertaining to the distribution of city-owned apartments. Sobchak went to France for medical treatment and remained there in voluntary exile— beyond the reach of investigators. The rise of Putin (who became head of the Federal Security Service in July 1998) and the dismissal of Procurator Yuri Skuratov in April 1999 enabled

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Sobchak to return to Russia in July 1999. The charges against him were dropped, but his public image was tarnished, and he failed to win a seat in the State Duma in the December 1999 elections. Sobchak died of a heart attack in February 2000 while on a trip to Kaliningrad as Putin’s envoy. An emotional Putin attended his funeral and pledged revenge on his enemies, blaming them for his death. Observers took this as referring to Vladimir Yakovlev, but Putin failed to prevent Yakovlev’s reelection as St. Petersburg governor in May 2000. Sobchak’s career, in which he evolved from a principled liberal to a defender of Russian capitalism and backer of Vladimir Putin, reflected the broader hopes and disappointments of the Russian transition from communism. Sobchak himself was aware of the contradictions, commenting just before his death that “We have not achieved a democratic, but rather a police state over the past ten years.”

See also: PERESTROIKA; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; ST.

PETERSBURG;

YAKOVLEV,

ALEXANDER

NIKO-

LAYEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Holiman, Alan. (2000). “Remembering Anatoly Sobchak.” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 8(3):324–329. PETER RUTLAND

SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY Social democracy was a product of capitalism in Imperial Russia around 1900. Until the 1890s, Russian socialism meant agrarian Populism, an illegal, conspiratorial, and terrorist movement of the educated intelligentsia that placed its faith in the peasant village commune. After state-funded railroad building inspired rapid industrial growth in Russia, many intellectuals became Marxist Social Democrats. Social Democrats believed that they could combine socialism with democracy, without any centralized state nationalization of property. Karl Marx had criticized capitalism as both inefficient and unjust, a cause of violent class struggle that would lead inevitably to a proletarian class seizure of power from the property-owning bourgeoisie, or capitalist class. Industrial capitalism would cause its own demise.

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The Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) originated in 1898 in Minsk. The party’s central organizer and later source of internal division was Vladimir Ilich Lenin (V. I. Ulyanov). The RSDWP modeled itself after the Socialist Party of Germany (SPD), whose Marxist orthodoxy was then challenged by revisionism. Revisionists argued that reform, not revolution, would best serve worker interests, and favored elections over strikes. The RSDWP split into Menshevik (minority) and Bolshevik (majority) factions in 1903. The Mensheviks believed that workers should lead the party and constitute its membership. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, believed that well-organized professional revolutionaries could better organize the party against the imperial police. Such revolutionaries would force revolutionary consciousness upon workers, who might otherwise turn to revisionism and reform. The RSDWP played a minimal role in the 1905 Russian Revolution. Tsar Nicholas II legalized labor unions and allowed a new freely elected parliament, or Duma. But as police cracked down on radical peasants, workers, and non-Russian nationalities seeking independence, party members went underground. Many emigrated to Europe. The Mensheviks broadened their base among factory workers inside Russia. The Bolsheviks robbed banks, fled to Europe, and disagreed over whether or not to participate in elections to the bourgeois Duma. The police succeeded in penetrating the party, arresting many members (including Josef Stalin) and recruiting police agents. By 1914 the RSDWP was divided and weak, competing for support with rival liberal (Constitutional Democrat), agrarian socialist (Social Revolutionaries), and national (Jewish Bund) parties. In February 1917, Imperial Russia collapsed under the pressures of World War I. A Provisional Government tried to continue the war and carry out democratic and agrarian reforms. But the army began to disintegrate, and the urban and rural masses, organized in soviets (councils), moved increasingly leftward, seizing factories and land. The Bolsheviks slowly developed into a mass party. In April 1917, Lenin returned to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) from Swiss exile. He immediately declared war on the bourgeois Provisional Government. In November, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, Moscow, and other towns. Lenin headed a new socialist government advocating workers


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control of factories, peasant land reform, and peace with the Central Powers. Russia then became the world’s first socialist state, led by a single party, the Bolsheviks, renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), or (RKP (b)) in 1918, then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1924. Lenin quickly created his own police state and arrested, tried, and exiled old political enemies, especially Mensheviks, Kadets, and Social Revolutionaries. Many ordinary citizens died in war, civil war, famine, and terror as a new party ruled in their name. After the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, the RSDWP became essentially two parties. The Bolsheviks led Russia down a separate path to civil war, industrial growth, collectivization of agriculture, and totalitarianism. The Mensheviks became exile critics of a revolution they helped create and barely survived. In 1991, the RSDWP’s greatest achievement, the Soviet Union, collapsed.

See also:

BOLSHEVISM; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; LENIN,

VLADIMIR ILICH; MENSHEVIKS; OCTOBER REVOLUTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ascher, Abraham. (1972). Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liebich, Andre. (1997). From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Service, Robert. (2000). Lenin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, Robert C. (1986). The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904–1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ROBERT C. WILLIAMS

SOCIALISM Broadly speaking, socialism is the ideology of collective ownership of the means of production and the joint distribution of goods. There were two principal currents in Russian socialism. One held that the peasants, who comprised more than 80 percent of the population, would be the driving force in the creation of the new society; and the other assigned that role to the industrial proletariat. The first current was initially advocated by Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), who had been a supporter


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of the Decembrists and left Russia for the West in 1847 to escape persecution. The failure of the Revolutions of 1848, which he attributed to the conservatism and attachment to private property of most Europeans, disappointed him deeply. He concluded that the chances for socialism were much better in his native country because the peasant commune had accustomed the Russian people to communal life and egalitarianism. The Russian peasant, Herzen contended, “has no morality save that which flows instinctively, naturally, from his communism.” These ideas came to be known as narodnichestvo, which literally means “populism” but is perhaps better translated as “Russian socialism.” Taken up by such thinkers and activists as Mikhail A. Bakunin (a radical anarchist), Nikolai K. Mikhailovsky, and Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, the populists gained a substantial following among the intelligentsia by the 1860s and 1870s. Although all populists agreed that Russia could by-pass capitalism in its evolution toward socialism, there was considerable disagreement over the means to achieve the final goal. Toward the end of his life, Herzen believed that socialism could be attained by peaceful means. Peter I. Lavrov was another strong advocate of peaceful methods; from the 1860s until his death in 1900 he argued that it was the obligation of intellectuals to educate the people politically and thus prepare them to undertake their own liberation. Chernyshevsky, on the other hand, did not believe that force could be avoided. The failed attempt by the populist DmitryV. Karakozov to assassinate Alexander II in 1866 and the ensuring repression prompted many revolutionary intellectuals to opt for peaceful tactics. Early in the 1870s, idealistic young narodniki launched the Go to the People movement; hundreds of them moved to the countryside and lived with the peasants in order to teach them to read and write as well as the rudiments of modern technology. But the ultimate goal of the populists was to prepare the masses for the revolution. Many peasants were baffled by the visitors and feared they were trying to lead them astray. Some peasants even turned them in to the police, who in the mid1870s arrested many of the populists, bringing the well-intentioned project to a close. But the ideas of the populists remained alive and were incorporated by the largest socialist movement in Russia, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), founded in 1902. The SRs advocated the transfer of all land to peasant communes or local associations, which in turn would assign it on an egalitarian basis to all who wished to earn their living by farming. Industry

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would be similarly socialized. Although the Socialist Revolutionaries insisted that the final goal, socialism, must be achieved by means of persuasion, they tolerated the “Combat Organization,” an independent organ of the party that carried out dozens of political assassinations. Political terror, many believed, was necessary to bring about the dismantling of the autocratic regime. In the meantime, in the late 1870s, a small group of intellectuals led by Georgy V. Plekhanov founded a Marxist movement in the name of the industrial working class, and this represented the second major current in Russian socialism. The Marxists contended that Russia’s development would be similar to trends in Central and Western Europe. The country would be industrialized, and would undergo a bourgeois revolution during which the autocratic system would be replaced by a constitutional order dominated by a middle class committed to capitalism. Eventually, when industrialization had reached maturity and the proletariat had become a powerful force, it would stage a second, socialist revolution. In 1898, the Russian Marxists founded the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, which five years later split into two factions. The split occurred over the seemingly minor question of how to define a party member, but it soon turned out that the differences between the Bolsheviks (majoritarians) led by Vladimir I. Lenin and the Mensheviks (minoritarians) led by Yuli O. Martov and Paul B. Axelrod touched on fundamental issues. Lenin, in keeping with views he had expressed in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?, favored a highly centralized, elitist, hierarchically organized political party, whereas the Mensheviks stressed the necessity and desirability of broad working-class participation in the movement’s affairs and in the coming revolutionary events. In short order, it also became evident that while both factions subscribed to a revolutionary course, the Mensheviks tended to adopt more moderate tactics than did the Bolsheviks.

Lenin sought to placate the peasants, still the vast majority of the population, by adopting the SR land program. He ordered the abrogation of the property rights of the nobility and placed land in the rural regions at the disposal of land committees and district soviets of peasants’ deputies for distribution to the peasants. But the Bolsheviks also remained faithful to their own program by introducing workers’ control in industry and in commercial and agricultural enterprises, abolishing distinctions and special privileges based on class, eliminating titles in the army, and outlawing inequality in wages. Lenin was convinced that the economically more advanced countries of Europe with large proletarian populations would soon follow Russia’s example in adopting socialism. When this did not happen, his successor, Josef V. Stalin, in 1924 formulated the doctrine of “socialism in one country,” according to which Russia was strong enough economically to reach the final goal of socialism by itself. Four years later, the Soviet government launched a second revolution by forcing the peasants into collectives and speeding up the process of industrialization. Much more so than ever before, the major economic decisions were now made by officials in Moscow. Then, in 1936, Stalin formally declared that the goal of socialism had in fact been attained. This claim was disputed by Leon D. Trotsky, the man he had defeated in the struggle over the leadership of the country after Lenin’s death in 1924. Trotsky maintained that socialism could triumph only on a worldwide basis. Stalinist socialism remained the regnant ideology of the country until 1991, although many Stalinist methods of rule were gradually abandoned following Stalin’s death in 1953.

See also:

BOLSHEVIKS; HERZEN, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH;

LENIN, VLADIMIR ILLICH; MARXISM; MENSHEVIKS; POPULISM; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; STALIN, JOSEPH VISSARIONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH

On November 7, 1917, after the country had endured three years of war that caused untold devastation and loss of life and eight months of revolutionary turbulence, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, which consisted of moderates committed to democracy and had been formed when the tsarist regime collapsed earlier that year, in March. Then, on November 8, one day after the Bolsheviks had formed a new government,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Baron, Samuel H. (1963). Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Haimson, Leopold H. (1955). The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lampert, Evgenii. (1965). Sons against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Malia, Martin. (1961). Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Walicki, Andrzej. (1995). Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Woehrlin, William F. (1971). Chernishevskii: The Man and the Journalist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolfe, Bertram D. (1948). Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical Study. New York: Dial Press. ABRAHAM ASCHER

SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY The question of whether socialism could be built in the USSR provoked a great ideological and political debate in the Soviet Union that lasted from 1924 to 1927. In response to Leon Trotsky, who, on the basis of his theory of “permanent revolution,” believed that “the genuine rise of socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the most important countries of Europe,” Josef Stalin first propounded his doctrine of “socialism in one country” in a newspaper article of December 1922. The difference between the two theories was based on a distinction between the processes of making a socialist revolution and a socialist economy. Every Bolshevik believed that the revolution that had proved victorious in October 1917 was a socialist revolution, but according to party doctrine it was impossible to build a socialist economy in a lone backward country, even though it was now clear that the foundations of a socialist economy were being laid. Stalin did not deny the importance of the international revolution or its likelihood in the near future because of the crisis in capitalism. But seizing on a few scattered passages of Lenin, including, from the last speech Lenin ever made, the quote, “NEP [New Economic Policy] Russia will become socialist Russia,” Stalin argued that because the “dictatorship of the proletariat” had been established in Russia through the peculiar conditions of the 1917 revolution—the alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry—the complete organization of a socialist economy in the USSR was possible, as part of the process of building social-


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ism. He qualified this by saying that “for the final victory of socialism, for the organization of Socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient” (Problems of Leninism, 1926), and, moreover, that the victory of socialism could not be considered secure while the USSR was encircled by hostile capitalist powers. Stalin developed the theory over the next two years, particularly in Problems of Leninism (1926). It was a very effective formula. Politically it was used as a stick with which to beat Trotsky, the Left, Leningrad, and United Oppositions: Stalin condemned his critics for lack of faith in the possibility of building socialism in the Soviet Union. Economically it was used as a basis for the industrialization of the USSR through the Five-Year Plans and the collectivization of agriculture, and it came to mean the opposite of NEP. It provided a slogan expressive of Bolshevik self-confidence after victory in the civil war and the establishment of the new regime, and in contrast to “permanent revolution” held out the prospect of stability. Its appeal lay partly in its reawakening of national pride in the self-sufficiency of the Russian revolution of 1917 and in the potential and destiny of the Russian people to become the progenitor of a new civilization. Through “socialism in one country” Stalin established himself as an ideologue, and the theory became the supreme test of loyalty in the Stalinist party and state.

See also:

NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; STALIN, JOSEF VISSAR-

IONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carr, Edward Hallett. (1970). A History of Soviet Russia: Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926, Vol. 2. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican. Deutscher, Isaac. (1966). Stalin: A Political Biography. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican. Stalin, Josef Vissarionovich. (1959). Works, Vol. 8: 1926, January–November. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House. DEREK WATSON

SOCIALIST REALISM On April 23, 1932, the Party Central Committee of the USSR adopted socialist realism (SR) as the official artistic mandate for Soviet literature (de facto

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for art, music, film, and architecture as well), a practice that, theoretically, governed the production of any work of art until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. While most frequently associated with literature (especially since the adoption of SR occurred practically simultaneously with the dissolution of all literary groups and their subjugation into one Union of Writers), socialist realism provided the guidelines according to which any artist should craft his work. Yet the very concept of socialist realism problematizes the process of definition. Over the course of its implementation socialist realism’s practitioners and critics have referred to it as a method, doctrine, framework, or style. Precisely the inability to definitively label it points to its inherent contradictions. Indeed, the best label for socialist realism could well be critic Yevgeny Dobrenko’s term—an aesthetic system. This moniker implies that socialist realism dictated far more than the form of an artistic work; in addition, socialist realism strove to control how an artist worked and how an audience received and perceived any work of art. Just as events in the Soviet Union unfolded, so, too, did socialist realism adjust to the new demands of changing times. Consequently, socialist realism was realized as a totalizing system that would inculcate Soviet citizens into the new ideological system, the result of the Bolshevik revolution, and the emergence of Stalinism. Andrei Zhdanov, then Leningrad Party boss and frequent spokesman for Party policy, delineated the program of SR at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Increasingly critics identify the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky as the true instigator behind the movement given his active role in establishing journals (such as Nashi Dostizheniya [Our Achievements]) and literary series (such as The History of Factories and Plants), as well as his editorship of volumes such as The History of the Construction of the Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal. Indeed many of Gorky’s polemical and didactic articles of the time delineate how writers were called to document, applaud, and encourage the building of the new Soviet state, especially vis-à-vis the first two Five-Year Plans, even though Gorky himself produced no original works of literature during this final period of his career. In addition, as had been proposed most vociferously by RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) in the 1920s, common workers should emerge as the chief arbiters of artistic production. It was believed that if properly trained, any worker could become a So-

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viet writer or artist, especially because, ideologically speaking, only workers had the appropriate class pedigree. Not surprisingly, although attempts were made to reforge (a common metaphor of the early 1930s) workers into masterful artists, much of this activity was in vain. As readers in the early 1930s were quick to point out, badly written or executed SR art was neither appealing nor inspiring. Indeed, recently some critics have noted that the reading and viewing public of the early 1930s played a much larger role in determining what kind of art would be produced, thanks to their active response to any artistic production that did not meet with their aesthetic sensibilities or did not conform to their conception of a typical work of Soviet art. This did not imply, however, that subsequent works of socialist realist art had uniformly high quality and were superior works of art; most were not. Hence, mounting pressure was applied to members of the various artistic establishments to embrace the new aesthetic model of socialist realism. In the literary arena some writers, most notably Mikhail Bulgakov, Osip Mandelshtam, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Anna Akhmatova to name but a few, consistently resisted the pressure to produce Party-mandated art; consequently they found it essentially impossible to have their work published. Others such as Mikhail Zoshchenko, Viktor Shklovsky, and Valentin Katayev attempted to find a compromise position that enabled them to continue to be published while maintaining a modicum of personal artistic style and integrity. Yet others, among them Alexander Fadeyev, Alexei Tolstoy and Vera Inber, subscribed completely to the Party mandate by producing literary works that strove to comply as closely as possible with socialist realism. Here, too, the issue of artistic quality emerged as a concern. Yet the outline above should not suggest that the divisions among artists were black and white categories that did not allow for subversions of the socialist realist canon or deviations from the “Party line” within an artist’s oeuvre. Consequently, it is not uncommon to find musical comedies in the 1930s, which, while celebrating the heightened class consciousness and loyalty of Soviet citizens, also featured musical production numbers, slapstick comedy, and lighthearted romance (e.g., Volga, Volga, The Jolly Fellows, Circus). In addition, in literature the early “canonical” works of socialist realism, which were posited as models for future works, predated the adoption of the socialist


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realist aesthetic. These include Gorky’s novel Mat (Mother, 1906), Fyodor Gladkov’s post-Civil war story Tsement (Cement,1925), Dmitry Furmanov’s Civil War epic Chapayev (1923), and Alexander Fadeyev’s Bolshevik drama Razgrom (The Rout, 1927) all of which presented the struggle for socialism from authors who understood how to present Soviet reality in its revolutionary development. As these examples illustrate, in literature the socialist realist genre of choice was the novel. Similarly, in music the symphony reigned supreme, while in tactile art, sculpture, and architecture massive, grandiloquent, and neoclassical exemplars managed to concretize the physical manifestations of socialist realism. Indeed, in one respect socialist realism’s lineage harkened back to the nineteenth century since its foundation rested on the aesthetic principles of realism and its purported ability to truthfully depict life as it was happening. Moreover, the populist movements of the second half of the nineteenth century, which greatly appealed to Bolshevik ideologists, including Vladimir Lenin, provided the prototypes not only for the appropriate psychological makeup of a character. In addition, these populist models served to situate socialist realist aesthetics in a revolutionary context that applauded the development of socialism. In addition, some critics have traced socialist realism’s genealogy through early twentieth-century Russian symbolism, a development that thereby enabled the Russian artistic and political avantgarde movements to share the notion of a perfect future life. The artistic avant-garde drew on the work of the Russian symbolist philosopher Vladimir Soloviev as the basis of its doctrine, while the political avant-garde followed Marxist ideology on its path to create a new Soviet society. Both avantgarde projects shared many of the same ideas, metaphors, and terminology in describing the “new world” they hoped to create. For example, while Soloviev espoused the idea that art was an instrument for creating the future, Marxists maintained that art was an instrument for transforming life, a process that, by its very nature, would create new men and women. Indeed, the Left Front Futurist theorist Nikolai Chuzhak links Solovievian symbolist principles with Marxist ideology, thereby creating a Marxist aesthetic that blended the theurgic impulse of Solovievian thinking with Marxist dialectics. Chuzhak labels this end product “ultrarealism,” a construct that “would express the dialectical collision between ‘what is’ and ‘what will


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be’” (Gutkin, 1999, p. 46). According to this interpretation, the artistic and political avant-garde movements already had sown the seeds of socialist realism long before its actual adoption. Similarly, the critic Boris Groys has argued, among other notions, that socialist realism was more avant-garde than the avant-garde itself. Whereas the avant-garde provided numerous theoretical models, mandates, and pronouncements for how the future world should be, they were neither willing nor able to completely replace or even destroy the traditions that preceded and produced them. In fact this futuristic vision could never fully be realized, precisely because the avant-garde sought to construct it on the existing cultural structure. Conversely, socialist realism was, according to Groys, able to achieve that which the avant-garde never could—to reject traditional cultural structures and in their place to construct a new system of artistic production that reflected the new society that was supposedly being created in the Soviet Union. Critics such as Herman Ermolaev and C. Vaughan James have argued that the basis for socialist realism rests firmly on Communist Party ideology and its desire to control cultural production to serve its ideological and propagandistic needs. Finally, the writer and literary critic Andrei Sinyavsky has proposed that the aesthetic system after which socialist realism was modeled harkened back not to nineteenth-century realism, but rather to the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century. As Sinyavsky notes, the necessity to produce statemandated art; the directive to applaud the glory, power, and vision of the State, especially vis-à-vis its own citizens and other cultures; the proclivity to build, write, paint, or compose works of art that were massive in structure, grandiose in their praise, and fraught with visions of how life should be, not as it actually was—these elements paralleled the demands put to socialist realism. Clearly the development and historical precedents in Russian cultural history for socialist realism are richer and more complicated than originally thought. In fact, even the proposed elements that had to be included in an artistic production to make it truly socialist realist were reconfigured and reemphasized as this aesthetic system continued through successive eras in the development of the Soviet Union. Initially a number of characteristics were required of a work of socialist realism. First, it had to depict Soviet life not as it was, but as it should be. Hence, any work of socialist realist art would

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exemplify for its reader or viewer a behavior, event, or image that captured an “ideal” rather than reality. As stated in Literaturnaya gazeta (September 3, 1934), “Socialist realism, being the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism, demands from the artist the truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism.” While this statement specifically refers to literature, the parameters it sets forth were applicable to any artistic production. In essence, any work of socialist realism should depict the bright future that Soviet public rhetoric continually promised its citizens, provided that they followed the socialist realist model. The epitome of this model was the “new Soviet man/woman” who through his or her Party-mindedness, intensive labor, class identity, and singlemindedness achieved great feats that resulted in a happy ending and that glorified the Soviet Union, thereby demonstrating the correctness of its ideology. In literature these new Soviet men and women were created by Soviet writers, the “engineers of human souls,” as Josef Stalin called them. Hence, almost from its inception Socialist realism was redolent with industrial metaphors and images. Writers, indeed all artists, were engineers charged with “reforging” or reconstructing characters, images, words, and deeds into manifestations of Party policy and Soviet power. Originally a work of socialist realism should contain four key elements. The first was ideinost— the work must be anchored in and resonate with Soviet ideology, i.e. Marxism-Leninism. Second, the work must convey klassovost—class-consciousness. The socialist realist heroes and heroines must personify their class heritage. Preferably they were to be members of the working class or, more rarely, enlightened peasants or intellectuals, who embraced the new ideology and demonstrated through their lives and work their allegiance to their class, and, ultimately, to the Soviet Union. Third, a socialist realist work must contain partynost—Party-mindedness. This meant that the firm, guiding hand of the Communist Party of the USSR constantly exerted its presence in a work of socialist realism, either in the character of an ideal Party member in a work of literature, or through the visual or aural presentation of a theme or motif that exuded strength, decisiveness, and grandiosity. Finally, works of socialist realism should have

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narodnost—the content of a work of art should represent the interests and viewpoint of the people (narod) rendered in an intelligible, approachable manner. Throughout the 1930s the aforementioned guidelines were strictly applied to artistic production. Whereas in the early 1930s collective heroism and collective labor (consonant with the goals of the first two five-year plans) were glorified and promoted, in the latter half of the 1930s up to the advent of World War II, individual heroes, from Stalin to polar explorers, from collective farm workers to Stakhanovites, were extolled. As the war years unfolded, the official enforcement of socialist realist imperatives lessened but definitely did not disappear. The slight flexibility, afforded writers in particular, to depict the brutality of battle during World War II (but not any mistakes of Stalin or his military commanders) was counterbalanced by the heroic music, art work, and films that understandably lauded the honest heroism displayed by common Soviet citizens in the face of the war. Nonetheless, when the war concluded, a redoubling of efforts to enforce strict principles of socialist realism emerged. Primary responsibility for this enforcement fell, once again, to Andrei Zhdanov, then chair of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Zhdanov’s most virulent wrath fell on poet Anna Akhmatova and writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose work Zhdanov aggressively attacked in the press. Consequently, the canonical elements of socialist realism reemerged and prevailed until the so-called Thaw in the late 1950s. This period (1953–1963) witnessed another lessening of the paradigmatic strictures that defined socialist realism. During this period relatively greater flexibility marked artistic endeavors. In particular, literary works were permitted to explore previously untouchable topics—the Soviet concentration camps, the difficulties of life in the countryside, the trauma of the post-war years— in a more humanely artistic, less formulaic way. This did not mean that Party supervision of artistic production diminished completely, nor were all works of literature written at this time permitted to be published (e.g., Lidia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna, Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle). Rather, a slight lessening of the controls enabled some artists to produce works that stretched the boundaries of socialist realism. This short-lived easing of control over artistic production ended with a further tightening of the


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parameters that defined socialist realism. While these parameters never approached the strictness of the early years of Soviet power, they persisted nonetheless. Ironically during this ensuing period—called Stagnation (1964–1985)—a number of interesting, original films, works of literature, art, and music appeared either through official channels or through the burgeoning artistic underground. This underground phenomenon permitted a host of officially censored or unacceptable works to be circulated among appreciative audiences through samizdat (self-publication) or tamizdat (publication abroad). Consequently, with each passing year, the hold that the socialist realist aesthetic exerted on Soviet culture gradually lessened until it dissolved into the period of glasnost in the mid-1980s. Nonetheless, the village and urban prose movements of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that socialist realism’s elasticity was greater than one might have imagined. Indeed, the traditional view that the artistic value of any work of socialist realism was compromised by virtue of the fact that it was Party-mandated, has lost some of its urgency. While not all works of socialist realism deserve attention and appreciation, many do. When coupled with the non–socialist realist works of this period, most notably Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, we are left with a rich, variegated artistic legacy. Moreover, the fundamental fact that socialist realism changed with the ideological and political demands of a particular time period argues for an inherent organicity that infused the system since its inception. Our understanding and, perhaps, even appreciation of socialist realism has grown thanks not only to the post-glasnost flood of archival texts and documents, but also thanks to the broader vision that hindsight provides.

See also:

BULGAKOV, MIKHAIL AFANASIEVICH; GORKY,

MAXIM; MOTION PICTURES; RUSSIAN ASSOCIATION OF PROLETARIAN WRITERS; SAMIZDAT; SILVER AGE;

R E V O L U T I O N A R I E S

tural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clark, Katerina. (1985). The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dobrenko, Evgeny. (1997). The Making of the Soviet Reader. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dobrenko, Evgeny. (2001). The Making of the Soviet Writer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ermolaev, Herman. (1963). Soviet Literary Theories, 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism. University of California Publications in Modern Philology, no. 69. Berkeley: University of California Press. Golomshtock, Igor. (1990). Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China, tr. Robert Chandler. London: Collins Harvill. Groys, Boris. (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism: AvantGarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gunther, Hans, ed. (1990). The Culture of the Stalin Period. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gutkin, Irina. (1999). The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. James, C. Vaughan. (1973). Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lahusen, Thomas. (1997). How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lahusen, Thomas, and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds. (1997). Socialist Realism without Shores. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reid, Susan E. (2001). “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935–1941.” Russian Review 60:153–184. Robin, Regine. (1992). Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, tr. Catherine Porter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tertz, Abram [Andrei Sinyavsky]. (1982). The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, tr. Max Hayward and George Dennis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

SOLOVIEV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH; THAW, THE;

CYNTHIA A. RUDER

ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brooks, Jeffrey. (1994). “Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All About It.” Slavic Review 53(4):973–991. Carleton, Greg. (1994). “Genre in Socialist Realism.” Slavic Review 53(4):992–1009. Clark, Katerina. (1978). “Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan.” In Cul-


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SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES The Russian Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party arose between 1900 and 1902. Industrial growth, peasant unrest, and the rise of the Marxist Social Democratic movement spurred an array of leaders

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from the earlier populist movement, as well as new figures, to create a party that adapted the older movement’s traditions to the new realities. Socialist Revolutionary ideology, organizational base, and personnel therefore reflected, but was not identical to nineteenth-century, Russian populism. The prime mover was Victor Chernov, the educated grandson of a serf. Chernov hailed from the Volga region, the new party’s first bastion. Chernov’s neo-populist theory maintained that industrialization had created a sizable proletariat and that the peasants had become a revolutionary class. In the SR view, a coalition of the radical intelligentsia, the industrial proletariat, and the peasants would make the coming revolution, whereas Russia’s middle class would remain quiescent. Consequently, the revolution would be socialist, hence the party’s title. This complex of views gave birth to a program aimed at propagandizing and recruiting workers, peasants, and intelligentsia. In addition, the SRs utilized terrorism to destabilize, rather then overthrow, the existing regime. The actual revolution, they insisted, would result from hard organizational work and a popular uprising. During the early 1900s, the party laid down a network of peasant-oriented organizations and in the cities challenged the Social Democrats among the proletariat. The SR Party won over some of the Social Democrats’ following through its popular terror program and appeal to both peasants and urban workers and as a result of splits within Social Democracy. By the 1905–1907 Revolution, the latter party still had an edge among the proletariat, but the SRs operated virtually unchallenged among the peasants. The SRs’ special attention to arming workers and peasants allowed them to play a lively role in armed struggles in Moscow, Saratov, and elsewhere during 1905. However, as Chernov later admitted, none of the socialists proved capable of uniting the opposition to overthrow the regime. Beginning in 1908, the Stolypin repression damaged all socialist organizations and destroyed SRoriented national peasant, railroad, and teachers’ unions. Debates and splits characterized party life, as the party put the terror program into abeyance. Furthermore, the revelation that party leader Evno Azev was a police spy further demoralized party cadres. Yet the party survived and plunged into the nascent labor movement. This tactic brought the SRs to virtual parity with the Social Democrats in many industrial areas and provided them with the means to become fully involved in the post-1912 revival of the revolutionary movement.

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The outbreak of the war in 1914 gave the regime its last opportunity to suppress the radical movement. Like the Social Democrats, the SRs split over the war issue. Leftists, known variously as Left SRs or SR-Internationalists, opposed the war, whereas Right SRs supported the government’s war effort. By 1916 the government’s ability to control the revolutionary movement waned. SR organizations opposed the war and propagandized revolution, often in coordination with Social Democrats. The February 1917 Revolution reflected protracted, sustained revolutionary activity, not least by SRs, who were also the revolution’s prime early beneficiaries. After tsarism’s fall, the SRs strove to reunite the party’s left, right, and center in order to dominate the new revolution. Moderate SRs and Mensheviks, in alliance with the liberals, soon led the Provisional Government, which the SR Alexander Kerensky headed after July. Still, the dedication of the moderate socialist-liberal coalition to pursuing the war gave ammunition to the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, who began to call for soviet, socialist power. Leftist SRs gradually moved away from the moderate leadership, which by then included Chernov and other former radicals. By the fall of 1917, the SR-Mensheviks’ cooperation with the liberals discredited those parties in the eyes of many workers and soldiers, who supported the Bolsheviks and other leftists. During the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks removed the Provisional Government from power in the name of the soviets. Deprived of the reins of government, the SRs’ residual support from the peasantry held them in good stead in the November 1917 Constituent Assembly elections, a success that proved untranslatable into political power. After the Soviet government dismissed the Constituent Assembly in early January 1918, many SR delegates, including Chernov, formed a government in Samara that sought legitimacy in association with the Constitutional Assembly. This government, like other SR-oriented governments in Arkhangelsk and Siberia, failed to stand up to Red and White military forces, in part owing to the shift of peasant support to the Left SRs, now a separate party. By late 1918 the SR Party had once again become an underground resistance movement, in this case against the communists, a status that party leaders managed to sustain until 1922. Massive arrests and the famous SR trials of that year effectively ended the party’s existence inside Soviet Russia. Chernov and many leaders escaped and lived in the European and North American emigration but had no real influence from abroad. Although the SR approach had initially won the party a huge back-


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ing during 1917, its combined worker, peasant, and intelligentsia program proved too broad to exercise power. Likewise, Chernov’s post-October 1917 “third way,” which hoped to unite democratic elements of the population between the two extremes of Bolshevism and the reactionary Whites failed, to catch hold in the chaos of civil war.

See also: BOLSHEVISM; CHERNOV, VIKTOR MIKHAILOVICH; CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; MENSHEVIKS; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; POPULISM; PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT; REVOLUTION OF 1905; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hildermeier, Manfred. (2000). The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Melancon, Michael. (1990). The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914–1917. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Perrie, Maureen. (1976). The Agrarian Policies of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party from its Origins through the Revolution of 1905–1907. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Radkey, Oliver. (1958). The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February–October 1917. New York: Columbia University Press. Rice, Christopher. (1988). Russian Workers and the Socialist Revolutionary Party through the Revolution of 1905–1907. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. MICHAEL MELANCON

SOKOLOVSKY, VASILY DANILOVICH (1897–1968), marshal of the Soviet Union (1946), military commander, and theoretician. Native of the Hrodna region, from a peasant family, Vasily Sokolovky entered the Red Army in February 1918 and studied in a short course for commanders. During the Civil War, he served with cavalry units. He later was transferred to central Asia and was attached to the Turkestan Military District and commanded units in Samarkand and Fergana, which were engaged in fighting against the Basmashi guerrillas. In 1921 he graduated from the military academy. Between 1922 and 1930, he served as chief of staff of a division and corps, and from 1930 to 1935 as commander of a division and chief of staff of the Volga, Ural, and Moscow Mili-


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tary Districts. He joined the Communist Party in 1931. Sokolovsky was fortunate not to come under suspicion during the Great Terror. In May 1940 he received the rank of lieutenant general. In February 1941 he was appointed as deputy chief of staff of the Red Army. In the beginning of the war, after Stalin ordered the arrest and execution of the leadership of the shattered West Front, Sokolovsky was appointed chief of staff of this front (July 1941– January 1942 and May 1942–February 1943). Along with these appointments, he was also the chief of staff of the Western Theater (July–October 1941 and May 1942). After the Battle of Moscow, the West Front, under Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev, failed in repeated attempts to break through the enemy lines, suffering massive losses for little gain, except for preventing the German units from being deployed elsewhere. Sokolovsky was involved in all these battles, and in February 1943, he was appointed commander of the West Front. His tenure in this position was marked by a lack of success even in sectors where the Red Army enjoyed a 10-1 superiority over the enemy. Sokolovsky was removed from command in April 1944 and replaced by Ivan Chernyakhovsky, and it was under his leadership that the West Front, now renamed the Third Belorussian Front, managed to roll over the enemy lines. During the great summer offensive of 1944, Sokolovsky returned to staff positions. He was attached to the First Ukrainian Front in April 1945 and took part in the Berlin Operation. Despite a rather undistinguished record during the war, Sokolovsky’s star rose in the postwar years. In 1945 he was Deputy Commander of the Soviet forces in Germany, and after Zhukov’s departure in 1946, the commander. In 1945 he also received the title of hero of the Soviet Union, a rarity for a staff officer. In 1946 Sokolovsky was elected to the Supreme Soviet. From 1946 to 1949 he was a member of the Allied Control Commission. In March 1946 he was the first deputy minister of the armed forces (from February 1950, war minister). In June 1952, he headed the General Staff and continued to hold the position after Stalin’s death until April 1960. He was also the first deputy war minister (from 1953, minister of defense). In 1952 he was elected to the Central Committee, but was demoted to candidate member in 1961. He was removed from active command in June 1960 and was attached to the Red Army inspectorate. He is buried at the Kremlin Wall. Sokolovsky’s fame rests mainly on his views on military strategy, published first in 1963, which have been studied in depth by Western strategists as the “Bible” of Soviet military doctrine.

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See also:

M O V E M E N T

MILITARY ART; MILITARY DOCTRINE; MILITARY,

SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; WORLD WAR II BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sokolovskii, V. D. (1963). Soviet Military Strategy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. MICHAEL PARRISH

SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT In the summer of 1980, Poland experienced labor unrest on an unprecedented scale. Faced with nationwide strikes, the ruling Communist Party was forced to sanction, for the first time in a Sovietbloc country, the creation of independent trade unions, free of state control. The emergence of the Solidarity trade union movement was viewed with acute anxiety by the leaders of Poland’s neighboring socialist states, the USSR in particular. How, given that the living and working conditions of Soviet workers were at least as bad as those of their Polish counterparts, could the development of similar labor unrest be forestalled in the USSR? The rise of Solidarity accordingly contributed to a far-reaching debate over political and economic reform in the USSR. The debate was even more significant since it occurred at a moment when the Soviet leadership was facing a major generational shift and concomitant power struggle. The aging leadership of Leonid Brezhnev had allowed social and economic problems to accumulate to such an extent that the USSR was experiencing stagnation in economic growth. This threatened the informal social contract between leaders and rank-and-file workers. In the early months of the Polish crisis (late 1980 and early 1981), after deciding against an invasion, the Brezhnev leadership adopted a series of stopgap measures to ward off the danger of contagion. For example, the jamming of Western radio broadcasts was resumed, while government financial priorities were revised to put increased emphasis on consumption. By the time martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981 it was clear that the danger of spillover to the USSR—if it ever existed—had been averted. Apart from a few isolated strikes and scattered leafleting in the USSR’s western republics, the Polish events evoked little sympathy among Soviet workers, who were inclined to believe that the USSR was subsidising its Warsaw Pact allies anyway.

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Faced with a continuing slowdown in the rate of economic growth, which was leading to stagnation, if not actual reduction, of popular living standards, the Soviet leadership abandoned carrots for sticks. This was exemplified by the brief leadership of Yuri Andropov (1982–1983), who launched a massive campaign to raise workplace discipline and crack down on crime, corruption, and alcoholism, with only limited results. The Polish events continued to reverberate when, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet communist party. Gorbachev publicly identified himself with reformist Soviet academics who argued that the Polish crisis was attributable not simply to the mistakes of Poland’s leaders but to a general weakness afflicting all single-party, planned economies of the Soviet type. Members of the reformist camp used the Polish example to press for radical reforms of the Soviet political and economic system. The Polish experience can accordingly be said to have acted as a catalyst to Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Gorbachev’s efforts to persuade Soviet workers and managers to take responsibility for the quality of their work, in return for enhanced rewards, met first with apathy, then with hostility and resistance. Gradually he adopted more radical measures, culminating in his efforts to strip the communist party of its monopoly on power. In attacking the party, however, Gorbachev was attacking the mainspring of the Soviet system. The result was the collapse of the USSR itself.

See also:

GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; LABOR;

POLAND; TRADE UNIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrew, Christopher, and Mitrokhin, Vasili. (1999). The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. London. London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. Teague, Elizabeth. (1988). Solidarity and the Soviet Worker: The Impact of the Polish Events of 1980 on Soviet Internal Politics. London: Croom Helm. ELIZABETH TEAGUE

SOLOVIEV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH (1853–1900), philosopher, theologian, journalist, poet, literary critic.


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At the end of the nineteenth century, Vladimir Soloviev sought to counter the secular trend in Russian thought by articulating a world view grounded in Christianity. As a young man, Soloviev seemed destined to become the foremost academic philosopher of the Slavophile school, and his early works, such as The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists (1874), reflected Slavophile themes, but in time he gravitated from Slavophilism to Westernism, much like his father, the renowned historian Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev. When Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, Soloviev called upon the new tsar to set an example of Christian forgiveness by sparing the lives of the terrorists. The ensuing scandal led to his exile from Russia’s government-controlled universities, a lifelong career as an independent writer, and eventually an association with the liberal journal Vestnik Evropy (European Messenger). Soloviev led an unconventional life as a kind of secular monk dedicated to intense intellectual work; the result was a remarkable output of philosophy, theology, poetry, literary criticism, and social commentary. Soloviev’s philosophical approach was a synthesis of Western philosophy (particularly German idealist thought) and the Orthodox faith in which he had been raised. His philosophical system emphasized the integration of science, philosophy, and religion. At the center of his philosophical outlook was the concept of the unity of all—the idea that the world was an Absolute in the process of becoming. On this basis, he developed a unique Christian metaphysics in his Lectures on God-Manhood (1877–1881). He argued that reality had been fractured by the Fall, and that history, the center of which was the Incarnation of Christ (the “Godman”), was a process leading to renewal of the unity of all. In this work, he also introduced the elusive concept of Sophia, which at various times he referred to as the “world soul,” the ideal of a perfect humanity, and the “eternal feminine” principle in the Divine. Soloviev’s fascination with Sophia was reflected in personal mystical experience. His reputation as a mystic derived from his poetry, most famously the poem “Three Meetings,” in which he described three encounters with Sophia, first as a young boy, then during his studies in the British Museum, and finally in the Egyptian desert. Meanwhile Soloviev was developing a liberal theology similar to the Social Gospel movement in the West. He criticized conservative intellectuals for compromising the moral claims of the Gospels, and


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advocated unification of the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches. Soloviev’s enthusiastic ecumenism provoked a nationalist backlash, which in turn led to his Christian critique of nationalism (The National Question in Russia, 2 vols., 1888, 1891). Soloviev went on to produce a wideranging ethical treatise, The Justification of the Good (1897), in which he provided an overall theory as well as practical discussion of such issues as nationalism, capitalism, and war. He also contributed to the development of a liberal philosophy of law in Russia. In the year of his untimely death at age fortyseven, Soloviev published Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of History, a controversial work of fiction that questioned the efficacy of human action in an evil world. The work concluded with “The Short Tale of the Anti-Christ,” a futuristic story about the end of the world. Some scholars argue that Soloviev here rejected his liberal theology, but others contend that the central meaning of the story is consistent with his earlier work, because a unified, truly ecumenical humanity triumphs. A uniquely independent thinker during his life, Soloviev had great influence after his death. His theology inspired social activism among some Orthodox clergy, a trend cut short by the Bolshevik Revolution. His philosophy paved the way for Orthodox thinkers like Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky. His mystical poetry inspired symbolists like Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. And after the Soviet Union came to an end, many Russians returned to Soloviev as a guidepost for creating a new Russian philosophy.

See also:

BELY, ANDREI; BLOK, ALEXANDER ALEXAN-

DROVICH; BULGAKOV, SERGEI NIKOLAYEVICH; ORTHODOXY; SILVER AGE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Copleston, Frederic C. (1986). Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Berdyaev. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Gaut, Greg. (1998). “Can a Christian Be a Nationalist? Vladimir Soloviev’s Critique of Nationalism.” Slavic Review 57:77–94. Groberg, Kristi A. (1992). “The Feminine Occult Sophia in the Russian Religious Renaissance: A Bibliographic Essay.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies. 26:197–240. Kline, George L. (1985). “Russian Religious Thought.” In Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West. Vol.

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2, ed. Ninian Smart. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kornblatt, Judith, and Gustafson, Richard, eds. (1996). Russian Religious Thought. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sutton, Jonathan. (1988). The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev: Towards a Reassessment. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

ers. Abandoned soon afterward, Solovki was reopened as a museum in the 1970s, then closed again until the end of Soviet rule, when it was reopened to the public.

See also:

KIRILL-BELOOZERO MONASTERY; MONASTICISM;

OLD BELIEVERS; SIMONOV MONASTERY; TRINITY ST. SERGIUS MONASTERY

Walicki, Andrzej. (1987). Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. GREG GAUT

SOLOVKI ISLAND See

GULAG.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Michels, Georg. (1992). “The Solovki Uprising: Religion and Revolt in Northern Russia.” Russian Review 51:1–15. Spock, Jennifer B. (1999). “The Solovki Monastery, 1460–1645: Piety and Patronage in the Early Modern Russian North.” Ph.D. diss. Yale University. JENNIFER B. SPOCK

SOLOVKI MONASTERY Located on the Solovki Archipelago in the White Sea, the Solovki (Solovetsk) monastery was founded between 1429 and 1436 by the hermits Savaty and German, followed by the monk and future abbot Zosima. By the early sixteenth century, Savaty and Zosima had become the patron saints of the White Sea region. Solovki, also a garrison, was one of Russia’s most important cloisters with extensive territories, earning income from trade, salt, fishing, and rents. Metropolitan Phillip II of Moscow contributed significantly to Solovki’s architectural development while serving as abbot (1546–1566). Its monastic rule, formulated in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, became a template for later communities. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich’s troops besieged Solovki from 1668 to 1676 in a conflict traditionally linked to Old Belief. Solovki’s leaders and a large part of the brotherhood first accepted, then rejected, Patriarch Nikon’s liturgical reforms. However, rebellion against central authority combined religious concerns with anti-Moscow sentiment fostered by political exiles imprisoned at Solovki. After their defeat, many monks left, ultimately to swell the number of trans-Volga elders—hermits who served as spiritual fathers to disaffected Orthodox communities.

SOLZHENITSYN, ALEXANDER ISAYEVICH (b. 1918), Nobel Laureate for Literature, one of the most prominent Soviet dissidents of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in the southern resort town of Kislovodsk. His father, a tsarist officer, died before his birth, and he was raised by his mother in Rostov-On-Don. He studied math and physics at Rostov University and was married in 1940 to his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya. Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer in the Red Army during World War II and was arrested by the secret police in February 1945 for criticizing Josef Stalin in his personal correspondence.

Solovki remained an active monastery and popular pilgrimage site until the October Revolution, after which the Soviet government transformed it into a military training camp. It became a labor camp in the 1920s and 1930s for political prison-

Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years, which he served in a number of facilities, including a sharashka (a special scientific installation/ prison) and a labor camp in Kazakhstan. He was released from the camp system in February 1953, and then was sent into enforced internal exile in rural Kazakhstan, where he taught high school. Solzhenitsyn was diagnosed and treated for cancer during this period. He also reconciled with his wife, from whom he was divorced during his imprisonment. He was allowed to move to Ryazan, where he taught physics, after his conviction was overturned in 1957.

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ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

Solzhenitsyn burst abruptly onto the national and international stages in November 1962, with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the journal Novy mir (New World). This deceptively simple novella describes a normal day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet forcedlabor camp in the early 1950s. It was the first work he had submitted for publication, though he had been writing for thirty years. Novy mir’s chief editor, Andrei Tvardovsky, passed the story on to one of Nikita Khrushchev’s aides. Khrushchev, who had started a second round of de-Stalinization in 1961, personally approved its publication, which would have been impossible otherwise. The publication of Ivan Denisovich caused a sensation. Although millions of Soviet citizens had been released from the camps or internal exile in the late 1950s, the topic had never been discussed publicly. The novella immediately sold out several press-runs totaling almost a million copies, provoking widespread discussion. Many liberal Soviet intellectuals hoped, in vain, that its appearance presaged a further loosening of artistic controls. It was also translated into numerous foreign languages and held up as a triumph of Soviet art. The combination of the novella’s content and artistic quality made Solzhenitsyn an internationally recognized writer. He published several short stories in the months that followed, all in Novy mir.

SOLZHENITSYN AS A DISSIDENT

The ten years after 1963 saw a rapid deterioration of the relationship between Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet leadership, devolving into open hostility by 1969. A crackdown against outspoken writers began in late 1963 and intensified greatly after Khrushchev was ousted from power in 1964. In this new environment, Solzhenitsyn was unable to publish anything, including two new semiautobiographical novels: The First Circle, based on his sharashka experiences, and Cancer Ward, both of which were highly critical of the Soviet system. Their publication, even in revised form, was blocked by Party hardliners, who instead tried to coerce Solzhenitsyn to write more positive works about the Soviet Union. In the meantime, some of Solzhenitsyn’s works began to circulate in samizdat, and a few were published abroad without his permission. These developments, along with the accidental discovery by


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Alexander Solzhenitsyn holds his first press conference in the West after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

the KGB of some of his most critical writings in 1965, led to a hardening of official attitudes towards Solzhenitsyn. In 1967, Solzhenitsyn attacked the powerful Union of Soviet Writers, criticizing it for persecuting writers on behalf of the state, instead of protecting their artistic freedom. Solzhenitsyn’s approval of the foreign publication of Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and other works, created further friction. Party and state officials responded by launching an escalating campaign of harassment, slander, and threats, including his expulsion from the Writers’ Union in 1969. Although Solzhenitsyn was part of a larger dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s, he was unique in a number of ways. His international prominence, which only grew after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, protected him from arrest, and allowed him to be more confrontational in his actions than most other dissidents. It also allowed him access to Western reporters.

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Solzhenitsyn also had his own unique political agenda. While most Soviet dissidents focused on the need for basic human rights, by the early 1970s Solzhenitsyn began to focus on the issue of morality. He believed that the Russian people could only be saved by a rejection of Bolshevik ideas and the resurrection of what he considered a unique set of moral values developed in Russia over centuries under the influence of Orthodox Christianity. He looked to pre-Revolutionary Russia for guidance, not to the West; indeed, he believed that these Russian spiritual values could save the West as well. Solzhenitsyn criticized Western culture for its decadence and argued it was weakening the United States to the point where it would soon no longer be able to stand up to the communist threat. He denounced the policy of détente, saying that the Soviet Union was using the process to take advantage of the United States’ weakness. Solzhenitsyn’s religiously tinged nationalism was similar to that of the nineteenth-century Slavophile movement. Although hinted at in interviews, Solzhenitsyn’s philosophical opinions only became widely known after his arrival in the West in 1974.

THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

In the mid-1960s, Solzhenitsyn began work on a project titled The Gulag Archipelago. The title referred to the extensive system of prisons and forcedlabor camps that had begun shortly after 1917 and expanded dramatically under Stalin; the term Gulag was the Russian acronym for the Main Directorate for Camps. The book, which Solzhenitsyn termed “an experiment in literary investigation,” was based on his own experiences and those of over two hundred former prisoners. This epic work eventually ran to three large volumes. Although the manuscript was completed and copies smuggled to the West in 1968, Solzhenitsyn delayed its publication abroad until the end of 1973, when his hand was forced by the KGB’s seizure of a manuscript copy. The Gulag Archipelago was by far Solzhenitsyn’s most damning work on the Soviet system. It described, in horrifying detail, the ordeal that prisoners underwent, from arrest through life in the camps, including the systematic use of torture and attempts to dehumanize prisoners. It also argued that the organized use of state terror was an integral part of Soviet communism from the start, and that Stalin only expanded the system created by Vladimir Lenin. Solzhenitsyn predicted, correctly,

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that the appearance of this work would intensify state actions against him; he was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union shortly after its publication in the West. The publication of the Gulag Archipelago’s first volume had a huge impact outside the Soviet bloc, particularly in Europe and the United States, where it sold millions of copies. It is widely considered to have done more than any other single book to shatter Western illusions about the nature of the Soviet dictatorship. The term Gulag entered widespread use in many languages. The book’s influence was particularly strong in France, where many intellectuals had remained sympathetic to Soviet communism until its publication. The book’s impact was heightened by its presentation, which mixed fiery rhetoric with literary skills, separating it from standard historical writings. Appropriately, Solzhenitsyn used his profits from the project to aid the families of jailed Soviet dissidents. Many readers were overwhelmed by the book’s size, however, and sales of the next two volumes were considerably lower. Although some of Solzhenitsyn’s specific facts and details are now contested, the Gulag Archipelago remains one of the definitive works on the Soviet prison system.

EXILE AND RETURN

In February 1974 Solzhenitsyn was arrested, charged with treason, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and expelled to West Germany. Party leaders believed that exiling Solzhenitsyn would be less damaging to their international reputation than sending him to prison. His second wife, Natalia Svetlova, and their sons were allowed to follow him a short time later. After a brief period in Europe, Solzhenitsyn moved to the United States, settling in Vermont. After a tumultuous reception, Western sympathies towards Solzhenitsyn cooled after he articulated his moral philosophy in a series of articles and lectures, which concluded with his 1978 Graduation Address at Harvard. His attacks on Western culture alienated many, and he eventually withdrew into self-imposed seclusion in Vermont, where he worked on his Red Wheel series of novels. Solzhenitsyn also engaged in heated polemics with members of the dissident and emigré communities who disagreed with his views and tactics. In 1989 Solzhenitsyn’s writings began to appear in the Soviet Union, starting with The Gulag


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Archipelago. Although he published some additional articles in the Soviet press, his absence from the scene limited his influence during the period of transition. Solzhenitsyn finally returned to Russia, amid great publicity, in 1994. Upon his return, he had a short-lived television talk show (1994–1995) and published several books. His didactic style has limited his audience, however, and he has had relatively little influence on Russian society since his return. Solzhenitsyn continues writing; one of his works, Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together, 2000), revived old accusations of antiSemitism, charges which Solzhenitsyn and many observers reject as false.

See also:

DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GULAG; NATIONALISM

IN THE ARTS; NOVY MIR; SAMIZDAT; SLAVOPHILES; UNION OF SOVIET WRITERS BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pearce, Joseph. (1999). A Soul in Exile. London: HarperCollins. Remnick, David. (1997). Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia. New York: Random House. Scammell, Michael. (1984). Solzhenitsyn: A Biography. New York: Norton. Scammell, Michael, ed. and intro. (1995). The Solzhenitsyn Files, tr. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick et. al. Chicago: Edition. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isaevich. (1963). One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, tr. Ralph Parker. New York: Dutton. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isaevich. (1968). Cancer Ward, tr. Nicholas Bethell and David Burg. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isaevich. (1968). The First Circle, tr. Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isaevich. (1974–1978). The Gulag Archipelago. 3 vols., tr. Thomas P. Whitney (vol. 1–2), H. T. Willets (vol. 3). New York: Harper & Row. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isaevich. (1980). East and West. New York: Harper Perennial. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isaevich. (1980). The Oak and the Calf: A Memoir, tr. Harry Willetts. New York: Harper & Row.

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The fifth daughter of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and his first wife Maria Miloslavskaya, Sophia spent her youth in the terem, where her freedom was restricted, but she also came into contact with the new cultural trends of Tsar Alexei’s later years. Many historians describe her as a pupil of Simeon Polotsky, but, although she was literate, there is no hard evidence that she studied with him. Those who regard Sophia as ambitious believe that she prepared for power during the reign of her brother Tsar Fyodor (r. 1676–1682) by attending his sickbed and making political alliances, notably with Prince Vasily Golitsyn, whose lover she is said to have became. However, evidence of an intimate relationship, which would have seriously breached Muscovite moral codes, rests mainly on hearsay and rumor, as do Sophia’s early political ambitions. Following Fyodor’s death in 1682, in the absence of mature males of royal blood, Sophia entered the political arena, as Muscovite conventions allowed royal women to do. She was motivated by the decision to make her half-brother Peter (b. 1672) sole ruler in preference to the elder, but physically and mentally handicapped, Tsarevich Ivan (b. 1666). Exploiting the Moscow militia’s (musketeers’) action to air grievances and take revenge on unpopular officers and officials in Peter’s government, in May 1682 Sophia and her party were able to secure Ivan’s accession as joint tsar with Peter. Most historians refer to Sophia as regent to her brothers, although she was never formally appointed as such. Even so, she was widely regarded as ruler and consolidated her authority by successfully quelling the continuation of musketeer unrest in 1682 during the period known as the Khovanshchina. She began to add her name to those of her brothers in royal edicts and to take part in public ceremonies and receptions, discarding some of the restrictions of the terem.

BRIAN KASSOF

H I S T O R Y

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Thomas, D. M. (1998). Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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(1657–1704); regent to Tsars Ivan V and Peter I, 1682–1689.

The dual monarchy required a new configuration of power at court in order to defuse tensions and achieve a consensus. Many additional men were promoted to boyar status. The ascendancy of the Miloslavsky clan was marginal, and by the late 1680s they lost ground to Peter’s maternal relatives the Naryshkins and their clients. Sophia relied on Prince Vasily Golitsyn to spearhead both her foreign and her domestic policy, although later the

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isaevich. (1995). The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, tr. Yermolai Solzhenitsyn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.


SOPHIA

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R I C H A R D

higher education, the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, founded in 1685, also relied on foreign teachers. Like many powerful women, Sophia has been accused of Machiavellian tendencies. Although there is no evidence that she intended Peter harm, she did adopt a highly visible rulership profile and began to use the feminine form of the title “autocrat” (samoderzhitsa). She sponsored an impressive building program in the fashionable Moscow Baroque style and had her portrait with crown, orb, and scepter painted and reproduced in prints. Poets praised her, playing on the associations of her name (Sophia the Holy Wisdom). All this fueled fears that she planned to be crowned and spawned rumors of plots against Peter and his mother. Ultimately, her regime was undermined by the failure of two military campaigns against the Crimea in 1687 and 1689, leading to a standoff provoked by Peter’s supporters. This time the musketeers’ support for Sophia was lukewarm and did not quell her opponents. Some of her supporters were executed, and Sophia herself was banished to a convent. In 1698 the musketeers rebelled again. Rumors circulated that Sophia was the instigator, but the evidence was inconclusive. Nevertheless, Peter forced her to take the veil under the name Susannah. She died in the Novodevichy convent in Moscow in 1704. Portrait of Regent Sophia Alexeyevna by Ilya Repin. © ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS

See also:

FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; GOLITSYN, VASILY

VASILIEVICH; IVAN V; PETER I; STRELTSY

secretary Fyodor Shaklovity rose to prominence. The regime’s crowning achievement was the 1686 treaty with Poland, which ratified the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667) in return for Russia’s agreement to sever relations with the Ottoman empire and enter the Holy League, a stepping-stone toward Russia’s ascendancy over Poland, achieved later in Peter I’s reign. At home, efforts continued to maximize the fulfillment of service requirements and the payment of tax liabilities and to maintain law and order. Mildness in some areas, for example banning the cruel practice of burying alive women who murdered their husbands, was offset by savage penalties against Old Believers (edict of 1685). At the same time, developments in foreign policy forced the regime to relax restrictions on non-Orthodox foreigners, which annoyed conservatives. Russia offered sanctuary from persecution to French Protestants and made concessions to foreign merchants and industrialists to encourage them to set up businesses. In 1689 commercial treaties were signed with Prussia. Russia’s first institute of

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hughes, Lindsey. (1988). “’Ambitious and Daring Above her Sex’: Tsarevna Sophia Alekseevna (1657–1704) in Foreigners’ Accounts.” Oxford Slavonic Papers 21: 65–89. Hughes, Lindsey. (1990). Sophia: Regent of Russia, 1657–1704. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thyret, Isolde. (2000). Between God and Tsar. Religious Symbolism and Royal Women of Muscovite Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. LINDSEY HUGHES

SORGE, RICHARD (1895–1944), Soviet spy. Richard Sorge was born to a German family in Baku. His father was a petroleum engineer and his grandfather, Friedrich Sorge (1828–1906), a col-


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league of Marx. In 1910 the family returned to Germany, where Sorge later studied in Berlin and Hamburg Universities. Drafted into the German army, he was a participant in World War I, and the combat experience converted him to socialism. In 1919 he joined the Communist Party of Germany. He held various positions as teacher and miner before returning to the Soviet Union in 1924, where a year later he joined the Communist Party and worked for various institutions before joining the military intelligence (GRU) in 1929. His duties took him to London and Los Angeles, and in 1930 to China. Returning to Germany, he established contacts with the military intelligence and Gestapo and was sent undercover as a journalist to Tokyo, and eventually as the press attaché in the German embassy. His scandalous life, which included heavy drinking and several affairs, served as a cover for his activities as a Soviet agent. The German military attaché was the source of much information, and through him, Sorge found out the plans for Operation Barbarrossa and duly informed Moscow. This news went counter to Josef Stalin’s belief, who did not anticipate war in 1941, and he even thought Sorge was a double agent. Beria also discounted similar reports from his own agents in Germany, which confirmed Sorge’s warnings. The end result was the greatest military disaster to befall the Soviet Union, when Hitler attacked as Sorge had reported. In his work, Sorge received help from the Japanese communists and from his radio operator, Max Klausen (1899–1979). Born in Germany, Klausen immigrated to the Soviet Union in 1927 and a year later joined the military intelligence. After serving in China, he was sent to Japan in September 1935, where he joined up with Sorge. Like Sorge, he was arrested in 1941, but he survived and lived in East Germany. Sorge’s loose life finally brought him to the attention of the Japanese counterintelligence, which arrested him in October 1941. After two years in prison, Sorge was sentenced to death on September 29, 1943, and was hanged. There is no evidence that the Soviet government in any way intervened in his behalf, and in fact, Sorge’s long-suffering wife, E. A. Maximova (1909–1943), was arrested (September 4, 1942) by the NKVD and perished in prison camp. Only during Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw were Sorge’s services to the Soviet Union recognized, and on November 11, 1962, he was posthumously awarded the title of hero of the Soviet Union, and his wife was rehabilitated. Sorge’s life has been subject of numerous books, but his legacy remains that of one of the greatest intelligence


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coups of all time gone to waste because those in the position of power failed to heed it.

See also: MILITARY INTELLIGENTSIA; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF; WORLD WAR II BIBLIOGRAPHY

Johnson, Chalmers. (1990). An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Tokyo Spy Ring. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Whymant, Robert. (1996). Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Spy Ring. London: I. B. Tauris. MICHAEL PARRISH

SOROKOUST The sorokoust, or forty divine liturgies (i.e., eucharistic services), is a series of orthodox liturgical commemorations celebrated in memory of a dead person. The number forty derives from the Orthodox tradition that it takes the soul forty days to reach the throne of God. Because of the similarity in sound, it is sometimes thought that the term is connected to the Russian sorok, “forty,” and usta, “month,” but in fact it derives from the Middle Greek sarakoste, “forty” (ancient Greek thessarakoste). The forty liturgies are part of the standard Orthodox ritual for the dead, corresponding genetically and functionally to the Catholic tricenarius, or thirty masses. A tale from the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great (590– 604) about the helpfulness of the thirty masses for the souls of the departed (bk. IV, chap. 57) appears in Greek and Russian manuscripts with the number changed to forty. The first Old Russian sources that mention the sorokoust date from twelfth-century Novgorod. Canonical texts decry the practice of arranging for sorokousty in advance of a person’s death or even of celebrating them while the person is still alive. Last wills and testaments from Muscovite Russia frequently provide for comparatively small donations to be distributed by the departed’s executor to as many as forty churches where sorokousty were to be celebrated for the departed. A more limited version of the sorokoust, a commemoration in the regular liturgy for forty days, is still practiced in the early twenty-first century in Russian Orthodox churches.

See also:

ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH;

SINODIK

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Steindorff, Ludwig. (1994). Memoria in Altrußland. Stuttgart: Steiner. LUDWIG STEINDORFF

SOSKOVETS, OLEG NIKOLAYEVICH (b. 1949), industrialist, inventor, powerful minister in the Russian government from 1993 to 1996. Trained as a metallurgical engineer, from 1971 until 1991 Oleg Soskovets worked at the Karaganda Metallurgical Factory in Kazakhstan, rising from the shop floor to become the general director in 1988. In 1991 a police investigation of financial abuses led to the arrest of several of his colleagues, but he himself was not prosecuted. In 1989 he was elected to the newly formed USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and in 1991 he served briefly as minister of metallurgy in the USSR government. In January 1992 President Boris Yeltsin named him to head a state metallurgy commission, but that spring he was made deputy prime minister and minister of industry in the government of Kazakhstan. Again, he left after a few months, when the attorney general’s office reopened the factory corruption case.

work for the Association of Financial-Industrial Groups, of which he became chairman in 1995. Press and TV exposés linked him to allegedly criminal activity by the Mafia-connected brothers Mikhail and Lev Chernoi, colleagues of his in the metals industry. Although he made no effective response to the charges, he was not prosecuted.

See also: KORZHAKOV, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. PETER REDDAWAY

SOSLOVIE By the mid-nineteenth century, the term soslovie (pl. sosloviya) had come to designate hereditary groups such as the nobility, clergy, townspeople, and peasantry. Although soslovie is often regarded as the Russian equivalent to West European terms (the English estate, the French état, and the German Stand), it differed from these in several important respects.

After this, Soskovets became an assistant to Mayor Yuri Luzhkov of Moscow and continued his

Above all, the term appeared quite belatedly— in its modern sense only in the early nineteenth century. In contrast to medieval Europe, where estates had long been the basis of the social hierarchy, medieval Muscovy knew nothing similar—in language or social reality—to the corporate estates of Western Europe. Instead, just as the Muscovite state had “gathered in” principalities and lands, so too had it accumulated but not amalgamated disparate status groups based on occupation, residence, and ethnicity. Indeed, one lexicon of Muscovite language recorded nearly five hundred status groups. Although Muscovy sometimes used generic terms like chin (rank) to designate elite groups and bifurcated society into “service” (sluzhilye) and tax-bearing (tiaglye) categories, it recognized the distinct status of individual groups. Characteristically, even the nobility lacked a collective name; the service people (sluzhilye liudi) remained kaleidoscopic: elite princely clans and aristocratic boyars at the apex, with marginal, interstitial groups such as singlehomesteaders (odnodvortsy) and musketeers (streltsy) at the bottom. The peasantry, similarly, consisted of various groups, from serfs and indentured slaves to crown and state peasants.

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Named to head a state committee on metallurgy, Soskovets returned to Moscow in October 1992, only for Yeltsin five months later to appoint him deputy prime minister and overseer of Russian industry. He became close to Yeltsin’s security aide Alexander Korzhakov and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and chaired government meetings in the latter’s absence. He was a hawk on the first Chechnya war, and in February 1995 Yeltsin sent him to Chechnya with the thankless task of restoring economic and social life in the still war-torn republic. Later, unanswered allegations suggested that he had profited handsomely from the government cash sent to Chechnya for reconstruction. Over time, Korzhakov started pressing Yeltsin to replace Chernomyrdin with Soskovets. In January 1996 Yeltsin named him to head the campaign for Yeltsin’s reelection. However, Soskovets and Korzhakov favored postponement of the election, fearing that Yeltsin might lose. Eventually forced into a runoff, Yeltsin fired them both in June.

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Desperate to mobilize human resources, the eighteenth-century state sought to simplify this social order. One key impulse came from Peter the Great’s new poll tax, which forced the state to identify the specific subgroups of the privileged and to merge the numerous categories of the disprivileged. Amalgamation was first apparent in collective terms for the privileged nobility, initially as shlyakhetstvo (a Polish loanword) and by midcentury as dvoryanstvo, the modern term. From the 1760s, chiefly in an effort to transplant West European models of an urban third estate, some officials groped for a new terminology, but did not settle upon a generic term to describe and aggregate the smaller social units. Only in the first decades of the nineteenth century did the term soslovie finally emerge in its modern sense. The word had earlier denoted “gathering” or “assembly,” but nothing so abstract as corporate estate. In the early nineteenth century, however, the term soslovie came to signify not only formal institutions (such as the Senate), but also corporate social groups. Although other, competing terms still existed (such as zvanie and sostoianie to designate occupation and status groups), the term soslovie became—in law, state policy, and educated parlance—the fundamental category to describe huge social aggregates such as the nobility. The new terminology gained formal recognition in a new edition (1847) of the Academy dictionary of the Russian language, which defined soslovie as “a category of people with a special occupation, distinguished from others by their special rights and obligations.” The term not only persisted, but conveyed extraordinary intensity and complexity. Soslovie was more than a mere juridical category; it signified a group so hermetically sealed, so united by kinship and culture that some lexicographers invoked the word caste (kasta) as a synonym. The estate system, moreover, proved highly adaptable: New status groups—privileged subgroups (i.e., merchants), ethnic groups (i.e., Jews), and new professions (i.e., doctors)—became distinct sosloviya. The proliferation of estates reflected the regime’s desire to fit other groups into the existing soslovie order, as well as the ambition of these groups to gain formal legal status. Hence the complex of Russian sosloviya was far more differentiated and protean than a simplistic four-estate paradigm would suggest. The soslovie system reached its apogee, in legal recognition, lexical clarity, and social reality, in


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the mid-nineteenth century, but it was increasingly subject to erosion and challenge. In part, the regime itself—which had celebrated the soslovie as a bulwark of social stability against the revolutionary forces sweeping Western Europe—concluded that some social mobility and change was essential for the country’s development and power. To be sure, the Great Reforms of the 1860s made the inclusion of all estates (vsesoslovnost) a fundamental principle; the reforms sought not to abolish estates but to mobilize them all, whether for supporting new institutions (e.g., the organs of local self-government) or for supplying soldiers and officers for the army. But the emergence of revolutionary movements increased the regime’s concern about social stability and, especially from the 1880s, inspired much rhetoric and some measures to reaffirm the soslovie order. At the same time, modernizing processes like urbanization and industrialization were steadily eroding the soslovie boundaries. Rapid economic growth, in particular, had a critical, corrosive impact: the plethora of new professions and semiprofessions, together with the rapid growth of the industrial labor force, undermined the significance of the estate marker. Not that the soslovie was irrelevant; it was still the only category in passports, it was often correlated with opportunity and occupation, and it bore connotations of prestige or stigma. Nevertheless, social identities became blurred and confused; profession and property, not estate origin, became increasingly important in defining status and identity. As a result, by the early twentieth century, the distinctive feature of Russian society was the amorphousness and fluidity of social identities. In contrast to the traditional Western paradigm (“estates into classes”), Russian society exhibited a complex of “estates and classes,” with mixed and overlapping identities. The government itself, with its franchise laws and policies in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, came increasingly to count upon property, not hereditary status, in allocating electoral power and defining its social base. The privileged, such as conservative nobles, fought to preserve the soslovie order; the propertied and progressive deemed abolition of sosloviya a precondition for the creation of a modern civil society. Although the Bolshevik regime on October 28, 1917, dissolved all estate distinctions (one of its first acts), it did not in fact dispense with this category as it endeavored to identify adversaries. Hence personnel documents, from university applications to judicial

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records, regularly required information about the prerevolutionary soslovie status—an unwitting testimony to the enduring significance ascribed to soslovie in the formation of social identities.

See also:

ALEXANDER II; ALEXANDER III; CLASS SYSTEM;

GREAT REFORMS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freeze, Gregory L. (1986). “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History.” American Historical Review 91:11–36. Wirtschafter, Elise K. (1997). Social Identity in Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. GREGORY L. FREEZE

SOUL TAX The soul tax (podushnaya podat) was a capitation or poll tax levied on peasant communes and some urban inhabitants according to the number of males of all ages, as estimated by the periodic censuses (revizy) that began in 1718. Enacted by Peter the Great by decree on January 11, 1722, the poll tax was intended to maintain the armed forces in the peasants’ vicinity. For example, the support of an infantry soldier required payments from about thirty-six “souls.” During the Muscovite and early Petrine period there were numerous exemptions to the land and household (dvor) taxes, but by the mid-eighteenth century all peasants, whether private, state, or church, were supposed to pay around eighty kopeks. The latter two categories of enserfed peasants also paid rent (obrok) of 1.5 (later, 2) rubles, as well as some dues in kind. They could be drafted for work on roads and canals, for example.

tax even though it would have been more in their interest to raise rents instead. Since some males were either too young or too old to have income, the head of household had to pay for everyone. While the soul tax appeared to be per head, the village commune often distributed the burden on an ability-to-pay basis. The rate of tax per male soul, however, was fixed, as increases were considered politically dangerous, so higher yields came mainly from population growth. Efforts were made at each census, or revisia, to reduce the taxexempt population. All “idling” and “free” persons were included, as well as peasants of many kinds, including bondsmen (kholopi). The revenue from tax and rents, however, failed to cover the cost of the standing army during peacetime, not to mention the great expenditures of the Northern War, which may have actually reduced the taxable population. Owing to the tax and labor burdens imposed on them, then as well as later on, many peasants fled to the borderlands and across the frontier. The soul tax had obvious administrative advantages over the previous household tax. Under the new system, young men could not avoid paying tax simply by postponing their departure from the ancestral home, as they could under the household tax. Nor could peasants combine nuclear families into one extended household for the purpose of avoiding tax.

At first the soul tax was collected by military units directly. Subsequently the serf owners had to collect the tax for their private serfs, and district administrators collected it for state or church serfs in their jurisdiction. Landowners collected the soul

Russian historians of an earlier era considered the poll tax an increased burden on peasant households, but this seems unlikely, since the apex of war expenses and innovative kinds of taxes was reached in the years 1705 to 1715. For most serfs the monetary liability (as distinct from taxes in kind) under the poll tax appears to have been slightly lower than under the household tax. Furthermore, because the poll tax was the same regardless of the amount of land cultivated, there was an incentive to increase arable land at the expense of waste, and, in fact, the amount of cultivated land did increase during this period. That the poll tax is remembered as harsh is explained by the poor grain harvests of the time, which required peasants to buy food at high prices. After Peter’s death in 1725 the poll tax rate was lowered to seventy-four, then seventy kopeks, but during Catherine II’s reign it was raised to one ruble. The highly destructive Napoleonic Wars saw a further increase to two, then three rubles. The poll tax was eliminated between 1883 and 1886, but land taxes and redemption payments continued to the end of the empire.

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The rates of money taxation differed considerably depending on the class of taxpayer. Court, ecclesiastical, and state peasants, including free settlers (odnodvortsy), were supposed to pay about four times the rate for private serfs; merchants and burghers paid somewhat less—about triple the rate for private serfs. Nobles, officials, and clergy were exempt from the poll tax.

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See also:

CATHERINE II; GREAT NORTHERN WAR; PEAS-

ANTRY; PETER I; TAXES

W A R

See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT; REVOLUTION OF 1905

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kahan, Arcadius. (1985). The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anweiler, Oskar. (1974). The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921, tr. Ruth Hein. New York: Pantheon Books.

Lyashchenko, Peter I. (1949). History of the National Economy of Russia to the 1917 Revolution, tr. Leon M. Herman. New York: Macmillan. MARTIN C. SPECHLER

DAVID PRETTY

SOVIET-AFGHAN WAR See

AFGHANISTAN, RELA-

TIONS WITH.

SOVIET

SOVIET-FINNISH WAR

Soviet (sovet) is the Russian word for “council” or “advice.”

The Soviet-Finnish War of 1939–1940, which lasted 103 days and is commonly known as the “Winter War,” had its origins in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939. The secret protocols of that non-aggression accord divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet security zones. Finland, which had been part of the Russian Empire for more than a century prior to gaining its independence during the Russian Revolution, was included by that agreement within the Soviet sphere. Shortly after the dismemberment of Poland by Germany and the USSR, the Soviet government in October demanded from Finland most of the Karelian Isthmus north of Leningrad, a naval base at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, and additional land west of Murmansk along the Barents Sea. The USSR offered other, less strategically important, borderland as compensation. After Finnish President Kiosti Kallio rejected the proposal, the Red Army, on November 30, invaded along the extent of their border as the Soviet Air Force bombed the Finnish capital, Helsinki.

Its political usage began during the Revolution of 1905 when it was applied to the councils of deputies elected by workers in factories throughout Russia. Although suppressed in 1905, the soviets reappeared in nearly every possible setting immediately following the February Revolution of 1917. With the soviet in Petrograd setting the tone, they very quickly became the organs of power that the majority of the population saw as legitimate. Although the moderate socialists who initially led the soviets were reluctant to take executive power from the Provisional Government, most Russians seem to have favored rule by the soviets alone; the Bolsheviks’ call for “All Power to the Soviets” may well have been their most successful slogan. The October Revolution was timed to coincide with the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, both to forestall its taking power without Bolshevik initiative and to gain legitimacy from its approval. The new Bolshevik-led government was thus initially based on soviets, and the state structure formally remained so until Mikhail Gorbachev. For most of the Soviet era, the Supreme Soviet was theoretically the highest legislative organ, although the Communist Party held practical power. Throughout their history, soviets generally proved too large for day-to-day governance, a role filled by a permanent executive committee elected by the full soviet. Some scholars have suggested that the soviet became so popular an institution because it was an urban counterpart to the village commune assembly, a governing system with which most Russians, even in the cities, were familiar.


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Finland’s most formidable defenses were a line of hundreds of concrete pillboxes, bunkers, and underground shelters, protected by anti-tank obstacles and barbed wire, which stretched across the Karelian Isthmus. General (and later Field Marshal) Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, a former tsarist officer, had organized these defenses, and he commanded Finland’s armed forces during the war. During the first two months of conflict, Finland astonished the rest of the world by defeating the much larger and more heavily armed Soviet forces, especially along the Mannerheim Line. In snow—at times five to six feet deep—with temperatures plunging to -49° F,

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A Finnish village burns after a February 1940 air raid by Soviet planes. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

the Finnish defenders were clad in white-padded uniforms, and some attacked on skis. The Red Army troops were entirely unprepared for winter combat. In early February, the USSR enlarged its forces to 1.2 million men (against a Finnish army of 200,000) and increased the number of tanks and aircraft to 1,500 and 3,000, respectively. In March the Red Army broke through the Mannerheim Line and advanced toward Helsinki. Finland was compelled to accept peace terms, which were signed in Moscow on March 12, 1940. The USSR acquired more territory than it had demanded before the war, including the entire northern coastline of Lake Ladoga and parts of southwestern and western Finland. Approximately 420,000 Finns fled from the 25,000 square miles of annexed territories.

revealed that 127,000 Soviet combatants had been killed or gone missing in action. The Red Army overwhelmed Finnish defenses with massive formations. For example, to take one particular hill, the USSR attacked its thirty-two Finnish defenders with four thousand men; more than four hundred of the Soviet assault troops were killed. Material losses were similarly lopsided in the war. Altogether, the Soviet Air Force lost about one thousand aircraft; Finland around one hundred.

Soviet victory, however, came at a very high cost. Whereas Finland lost about 25,000 killed in the war, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov acknowledged that immediately after the war almost 49,000 Soviet troops had perished. In 1993 declassified Soviet military archives

The world’s attention was focused on the SovietFinnish War, because at that time despite British and French declarations of war against Germany in September 1939 over Germany’s invasion of Poland, there was no other fighting taking place in Europe. Finland was much admired in the democratic West for its courageous stand against a much larger foe, but to Finland’s disappointment, that admiration did not translate into significant outside assistance. By contrast, Soviet aggression was widely condemned, and the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations. More importantly, So-

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viet military weakness was exposed, which served to embolden Hitler and confirm his belief that Germany could easily defeat the USSR. Defeated Finland became increasingly worried when in the summer of 1940 the USSR occupied Estonia, which lay just forty miles across the Baltic Sea. Finland found a champion for its defense and a means to regain the lost territories when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. The USSR provided a convenient pretext for the start of the “Continuation War” (as the resumed hostilities are known in Finland), when it bombed several Finnish cities, including Helsinki, on June 25. While the Red Army retreated before the Nazi blitz to within three miles of Leningrad and twenty of Moscow, Finland invaded southward along both sides of Lake Ladoga down to the 1939 boundary. During the nearly nine hundred day siege of Leningrad, Finnish forces sealed off access to the city from the north. Close to one million Leningraders perished in the ordeal, primarily from hunger and cold in the winter of 1941–1942. Finland, which relied heavily on German imports during the war, rebuffed a Soviet attempt through neutral Sweden in December 1941 to secure a separate peace and relief for Leningrad. At the same time, the Finnish government refused German requests to attempt to cross the Svir River in force to link up with the Wehrmacht along the southeastern side of Ladoga. The lake remained Leningrad’s only surface link with the rest of the USSR during the siege. Finland’s position in southern Karelia became increasingly vulnerable as its ally Germany began to lose the war in the USSR in 1943. In late February 1944, a month after the Red Army smashed the German blockade south of Leningrad, the Soviet Air Force flew hundreds of sorties against Helsinki and published an ultimatum for peace, which included, among other things, internment of German troops in northern Finland and demobilization of the Finnish Army. After Finland refused the harsh terms, the Red Army launched a massive offensive north of Leningrad on June 9. In early August Mannerheim managed to shore up Finnish defenses near the 1940 border at the same time that the Finnish parliament appointed him the country’s president. However, continued German defeats and Soviet reoccupation of Estonia convinced President Mannerheim to agree to an armistice on September 19. The agreement restored the 1940 boundary, forced German troops out of Finland, leased to the USSR territory for a military base a few miles


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from Helsinki (which was later returned), and saddled Finland with heavy reparations. Although the Soviet Union basically controlled Finnish foreign policy until the Soviet collapse in 1991, of all of Nazi Germany’s wartime European allies, only Finland avoided Soviet occupation after the war and preserved its own elected government and market economy.

See also:

FINLAND; FINNS AND KARELIANS; NAZI-SOVIET

PACT OF 1939; WORLD WAR II BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mannerheim, Carl. (1954). Memoirs. New York: Dutton. Trotter, William R. (1991). A Frozen Hell: The RussoFinnish Winter War of 1939–1940. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. RICHARD H. BIDLACK

SOVIET-GERMAN TRADE AGREEMENT OF 1939 After declining relations throughout the 1930s and then a flurry of negotiations in the summer of 1939, Germany (represented by Karl Schnurre) and the Soviet Union (represented by Yevgeny Babarin) signed a major economic agreement in Berlin in the early morning hours of August 20. The treaty called for 200 million Reichsmark in new orders and 240 million Reichsmark in new and current exports from both sides over the next two years. This agreement served two purposes. First, it brought two complementary economies closer together. To support its war economy, Germany needed raw materials—oil, manganese, grains, and wood. The Soviet Union needed manufactured products—machines, tools, optical equipment, and weapons. Although the USSR had slightly more room to maneuver and a somewhat superior bargaining position, neither country had many options for receiving such materials elsewhere. Subsequent economic agreements in 1940 and 1941, therefore, focused on the same types of items. Second, the economic negotiations provided a venue for these otherwise hostile powers to discuss political and military issues. Hitler and Stalin signaled each other throughout 1939 by means of these economic talks. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed a mere four days after the economic agreement.

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Because raw materials took less time to produce, Soviet shipments initially outpaced German exports and provided an important prop to the German war economy in late 1940 and 1941. Before the Germans could fully live up to their end of the bargain, Hitler invaded.

See also:

FOREIGN TRADE; GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH;

NAZI-SOVIET PACT OF 1939; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ericson, Edward E. (1999). Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941. Westport, CT: Praeger. EDWARD E. ERICSON III

SOVIET MAN For many years, the term novy sovetsky chelovek in Soviet Marxism-Leninism was usually translated into English as “the new Soviet man.” A translation that would be more faithful to the meaning of the original Russian would be “the new Soviet person,” because the word chelovek is completely neutral with regard to gender. The hope of remaking the values of each member of society was implicit in Karl Marx’s expectations for the progression of society from capitalism through proletarian revolution to communism. Marx reasoned that fundamental economic and social restructuring would generate radical attitudinal change, but Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin insisted that the political regime had to play an active role in the transformation of people’s values, even in a socialist society. It remained for the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adopted at the party’s Twenty-Second Congress in 1961 in accordance with the demands of Nikita Khrushchev, to spell out the “moral code of the builder of communism,” which subsequently was elaborated at length by a wide variety of publications. The builder of communism was expected to be educated, hard working, collectivistic, patriotic, and unfailingly loyal to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. During the transition to a fully communist society, as predicted by Khrushchev, such vestiges of past culture as religion, corruption, and drunkenness would be eradicated. The thinking associated with the Party Program of 1961 represented the last burst of revolutionary optimism in the Soviet Union.

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Over time, it became increasingly difficult to ascribe “deviations from socialist morality” to the influence of pre-1917 or pre-1936 social structures. Indeed, testimony from a variety of sources suggested that reliance on connections, exchanges of favors, and bribery (which had by no means disappeared in the Stalin years) were steadily growing in importance during the post-Stalin decades. In the mid-1970s Hedrick Smith’s book The Russians described the members of the largest nationality in the USSR as impulsive, generous, mystical, emotional, and essentially irrational, behind the facade of a monochromatic ideology imposed by an authoritarian political regime. Though the Brezhnev leadership still insisted that the socialist way of life (sotsialistichesky obraz zhizni) in the Soviet Union was morally superior to that in the West with its unbridled individualism and moral decay, the sense of optimism concerning the future was slipping away. Ideologists complained ever more about amoral behavior by citizens, and the political leaders seemed to become more tolerant of illegal economic activity and corruption. Despite those general trends, problematic as they were, some Soviet citizens did strive actively to serve their fellow human beings, including the most vulnerable members of society.

See also:

KRUSCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; LENIN, VLADI-

MIR ILLICH; MARXISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DeGeorge, Richard T. (1969). Soviet Ethics and Morality. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Evans, Alfred B., Jr. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Westport, CT: Praeger. Mehnert, Klaus. (1962). Soviet Man and His World, tr. Maurice Rosenbaum. New York: Praeger. Smith, Hedrick. (1983). The Russians, updated edition. New York: Times Books. ALFRED B. EVANS JR.

SOVIET-POLISH WAR The Soviet-Polish War was the most important of the armed conflicts among the East European states emerging from World War I. The Versailles settlements failed to delineate Poland’s eastern border. The Entente powers hoped that the Bolshevik Revolution was temporary, and that a Polish-Russian


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border would be established after the victory of White Russian forces. As the eastern command of the German Army withdrew after the armistice of November 11, 1918, Vladimir Lenin in Moscow and Józef Pilsudski in Warsaw planned to fill the vacuum. Lenin hoped to export revolution, Pilsudski to lead an East European federation. In early 1919, Lenin’s main concern was the White Russian forces of Anton Denikin. Pilsudski did not support Denikin, a Russian nationalist who treated eastern Galicia as part of a future Russian state. In late 1918, Pilsudski watched as the Red Army moved on Vilnius and Minsk. Pilsudski’s offensive began in April 1919, his forces taking Vilnius on April 21 and Minsk on August 8. In collaboration with Latvian troops, Poland took Daugavpils on January 3, 1920, returning the city to Latvia. By then Denikin was in retreat, and the Red Army could turn to an offensive against the remnants of independent Ukrainian forces.

led to the establishment of the Soviet Union as a nominal federation in December 1922. During the 1930s, Josef Stalin blamed Polish agents for shortfalls in Ukrainian food production, and he ethnically cleansed Poles from the Soviet west. These preoccupations flowed from earlier defeat. Riga divided Belarus and Ukraine between Poland and the Soviet Union. The Red Army seized western Belarus and western Ukraine from Poland in September 1939 thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, undoing the consequences of Riga and encouraging forgetfulness of the Polish-Bolshevik War. Yet more than any other event, the PolishBolshevik War defined the political and intellectual frontiers of the interwar period in eastern Europe.

See also:

CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922; POLAND; WORLD

WAR I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Ukrainian National Republic of Symon Petliura allied with Poland in April 1920. With Ukrainian help, Pilsudski took Kiev on May 7, 1920, only to find his troops overwhelmed by the forces of Soviet commanders Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Semen Budenny. On July 11 Great Britain proposed an armistice based upon the Curzon Line, which left Ukraine and Belarus to Moscow. These terms displeased Pilsudski, but Polish prime minister Stanislaw Grabski had agreed to similar ones in negotiations with British prime minister David Lloyd George. Moscow’s replies questioned the future of independent Poland, and the Red Army encircled Warsaw in August.

D’Abernon, Edgar Vincent. (1931). The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

With the exception of its Ukrainian ally, Poland faced this attack alone. The French sent a military legation, but its counsel was unheeded. Pilsudski himself planned and executed a daring counterattack against the Bolshevik center, shattering Tukhachevsky’s command. He then drove the Red Army to central Belarus. The Battle of Warsaw of August 16–25, 1920, was called by D’Abernon “the eighteenth decisive battle of the world.” It set the westward boundary of the Bolshevik Revolution, saved independent Poland, and ended Lenin’s hopes of spreading the Bolshevik Revolution by force of arms to Germany.

TIMOTHY SNYDER

The Soviet-Polish frontier, agreed at Riga on March 18, 1921, was itself consequential. Poland abandoned its Ukrainian ally, as most of Ukraine was still under Soviet control. Yet the war forced the Soviets to reconsider nationality questions, and


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Davies, Norman. (1972). White Eagle, Red Star. New York: St. Martin’s. Gervais, Céline, ed. (1975). La Guerre polono-soviétique, 1919–1920. Lausanne: L’Age de l’Homme. Palij, Michael (1995). The Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance. Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Ullman, Richard H. (1972). The Anglo-Soviet Accord. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wandycz, Piotr. (1969). Soviet-Polish Relations, 1917–1921. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

SOVKHOZ The sovkhoz, or state farm, the collective farm (kolkhoz), and the private subsidiary sector, were the three major organizational forms used in Soviet agricultural production after the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, a process begun by Josef Stalin in 1929. Although the concept of the state farm originated earlier under Vladimir Lenin during the period of war communism, the serious development of state farms began during the 1930s as the Soviet state exercised full control over the agricultural sector. The state farm might be described as a factory in the field in the sense that it was full state property,

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financed by state budget (revenues flowed into and expenses were paid by the state budget), and subject to the state planning system, and workers (rabochy) on state farms were paid a contractual wage. All of these major characteristics of the state farm distinguished it from the collective farm. The sovkhoz was organized in a fashion similar to an industrial enterprise. The farm was headed by a state-appointed director, and the connection between labor force and sovkhoz resembled the structure of the industrial enterprise. Most important, capital investment for the sovkhoz was funded by the state budget. Thus, although prices paid by the state for sovkhoz produce were lower than for compulsory deliveries from collective farms, state farms were in a financially much better position. This was a major reason for the subsequent conversion of weak collective farms into state farms in the post–World War II years, a process enhanced by the Soviet policy of agroindustrial integration and the ultimate development of the agroindustrial complex comprising collective and state farms and industrial processing capacity. The role of state farms in Soviet agriculture grew steadily during the Soviet era. The number of state farms grew from less than 1,500 in 1929 to just over 23,000 by the end of the Gorbachev era in the late 1980s. This expansion resulted partly from state policy—the amalgamation and conversion of collective farms to state farms—and partly from the use of state farms in special programs expanding the area under cultivation, such as the Virgin Lands Program. State farms were large. During the 1930s, for example, state farms were on average roughly 6,000 acres of sown area. By the 1980s, they averaged more than 11,000 acres of sown area per farm. There were considerable differences in the output patterns between collective and state farms, and state farms were viewed as more productive and more profitable than collective farms. Generally speaking, the role of the state farms increased over time from modest proportions in the early 1930s. The sovkhoz came to be important in the production of grain, vegetables and eggs, less important for meat products. During the transition era of the 1990s, state farms were reorganized using joint stock arrangements, although the development of land markets remained constrained by opposition to private ownership of land.

See also:

AGRICULTURE; COLLECTIVE FARM; COLLECTIVI-

ZATION OF AGRICULTURE

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Davies, R. W.; Harrison, Mark; and Wheatcroft, S. G., eds. (1994). The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Volin, Lazar. (1970). A Century of Russian Agriculture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ROBERT C. STUART

SOVNARKHOZY Regional bodies that administered industry and construction in the USSR. The Sovnarkhozy (acronym for Sovety Narodnogo Khozyaistva, or Councils of the National Economy) were state bodies for the regional administration of industry and construction in Russia and the USSR that existed from 1917 to 1932 and again from1957 to 1965. The first Sovnarkhozy were created in December 1917 by the Supreme Council of the National Economy. Each of them had power over areas ranging in size from small districts up to several provinces. They were associated with local institutions such as soviets and were responsible to the Supreme Council for restoring the economy of their area after World War I and then the civil war. As the Soviet economy developed during the 1920s, control of industry was divided between the Supreme Council of the National Economy (which retained control of important strategic industries) and the Sovnarkhozy. The Sovnarkhozy were abolished in 1932 when the Supreme Council was divided into three separate industrial commissariats. Sovnarkhozy were reintroduced during Nikita Khrushchev’s 1957 effort to decentralize the economy. The USSR was divided into 105 Sovnarkhozy responsible to republican Councils of Ministers for the industry in the regions, except armaments, chemicals, and electricity, which at first remained under central control. The system had a fundamental weakness due to the lack of centralized direction and coordination, and Sovnarkhozy often pursued local interests and considered only the needs of their own region. In 1962 and 1963 attempts were made to reform the system, such as amalgamating the Sovnarkhozy and reviving the


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Supreme Council of the National Economy, but in 1965 Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin abolished the Sovnarkhozy and reestablished the central industrial ministries.

See also:

ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; KOSYGIN RE-

FORMS; REGIONALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nove, Alec. (1982). An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. Basingstoke, UK: Penguin. Prokhorev, Aleksandr M., ed. (1975). Great Soviet Encyclopedia: A Translation of the Third Edition. New York: Macmillan. DEREK WATSON

F A C T I O N

given membership. By 1936 the number of commissariats had risen to twenty-three, and by 1941 to forty-three. A major trend was the replacement of an overall industrial commissariat by industryspecific bodies. The 1936 constitution granted Sovnarkom membership to chairpersons of certain state committees. It also formally recognized Sovnarkom as the government of the USSR, but deprived it of its legislative powers. By this time the institution was and remained a high-level administrative committee specializing in economic affairs.

See also:

COMMISSAR; COUNCIL OF MINISTERS, SOVIET;

LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MOLOTOV, VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH; RYKOV, ALEXEI IVANOVICH; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SOVNARKOM Acronym for Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov (Council of People’s Commissars), the government of the early Soviet republic. Sovnarkom was formed by Vladimir Lenin in October 1917 as the government of the new revolutionary regime. The word commissars was used to distinguish the new institution from bourgeois governments and indicate that administration was being entrusted to commissions (commissariats), not to individuals. Initially membership included Lenin (chairperson), eleven departmental heads (commissars), and a committee of three responsible for military and naval affairs. Until 1921, under Lenin, Sovnarkom was the real government of the new Soviet republic—the key political as well as administrative body—but after 1921 political power passed increasingly to Party bodies. With the creation of the USSR in 1924, Lenin’s Sovnarkom became a union (national) body. Alexei Rykov was chairperson of the Union Sovnarkom from 1924 to 1930, then Vyacheslav Molotov from 1930 to 1941, and Josef Stalin from 1941 to 1946, when the body was renamed the Council of Ministers. There were two types of commissariats: six unified (renamed “union-republican” under the 1936 constitution), which functioned through parallel apparatuses in identically named republican commissariats, and five all-union with plenipotentiaries in the republics directly subordinate to their commissar. In 1930 Gosplan was upgraded to a standing commission of Sovnarkom and its chairperson


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Rigby, Thomas Henry. (1979). Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Watson, Derek. (1996). Molotov and Soviet Government: Sovnarkom, 1930-41. Basingstoke, UK: CREES-Macmillan. DEREK WATSON

SOYUZ FACTION The Soyuz faction was a group of hardliners in USSR Congress of People’s Deputies at the end of the Soviet era. Its leaders, Viktor Alksnis and Nikolai Petrushenko, had been elected as deputies from Latvia and Kazakhstan respectively, regions with large ethnic Russian populations that conservatives were trying to mobilize (in organizations called “interfronts”) to counter the independence movements that had sprung up under perestroika. While nationalists and communists dominated the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies elected in March 1989, democratic forces won the upper hand in the Russian Federation Congress of People’s Deputies, elected in the spring of 1990, which chose Boris Yeltsin as its leader. Alksinis came up with the idea of the Soyuz faction in October 1989. It was launched on February 14, 1990, but only became highly visible toward the end of the year, when conservatives mobilized to deter Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev from adopting the Five-Hundred Day economic reform program. Soyuz had close ties to the

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army and security services, and its goal was to preserve the USSR. At its formal founding congress on December 1, 1990, Soyuz claimed the support of up to one quarter of the deputies in the USSR Congress. Its sister organization in the Russian Federation Supreme Soviet was Sergei Baburin’s Rossiya faction. Soyuz put increasing pressure on Gorbachev to end democratization by introducing presidential rule, suppressing disloyal political parties, and cracking down on nationalist movements in the non-Russian republics. It reportedly persuaded Gorbachev to fire Soviet Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin, who had agreed to the creation of separate interior ministries in each of the union republics. On November 11, 1990, Alksnis persuaded Gorbachev to address a meeting of one thousand military personnel elected as deputies to various soviets; he got a hostile reception. A week later, speaking in the USSR Supreme Soviet on November 17, Alksinis effectively called for Gorbachev’s overthrow. Still, no one could be sure whether Gorbachev would stick with democratization or opt for an authoritarian crackdown. In January 1991 KGB teams tried to overthrow the independent-minded governments in Latvia and Lithuania. This drew fierce international criticism, and Gorbachev disowned it. Apparently he had given up the idea of using force to hold the USSR together, for he now began pursuing a new union treaty with the heads of the republics that made up the USSR. In response, a Soyuz conference in April 1991 called for power to be transferred from Gorbachev to Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov or Anatoly Lukyanov, chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet. Clearly the Soyuz group was laying the political and organizational groundwork for the coup attempt of August 1991, but the failure of the putsch sealed the fate of the USSR and of Soyuz, its most loyal defender. Alksnis was later one of the defenders of the anti-Yeltsin parliament in the violent confrontation of October 1993. Interviewed in 2002, he insisted that the USSR could have been saved if Gorbachev had acted more resolutely and not been “afraid of his own shadow.”

The XXVIII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ed. E. A. Rees. New York: St. Martin’s. Teague, Elizabeth. (1991). “The ‘Soyuz’ Group.” Report on the USSR 3(20):16–21. PETER RUTLAND

SPACE PROGRAM The Russian space program has a long history. The first person in any country to study the use of rockets for space flight was the Russian schoolteacher and mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. His work greatly influenced later space and rocket research in the Soviet Union, where, as early as 1921, the government founded a military facility devoted to rocket research. During the 1930s, Sergei Korolev emerged as a leader in this effort and eventually became the “chief designer” responsible for many of the early Soviet successes in space in the 1950s and 1960s. Under Korolev’s direction, the Soviet Union in the 1950s developed an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), with engines designed by Valentin Glushko, which was capable of delivering a heavy nuclear warhead to American targets. That ICBM, called the R-7 or Semyorka (“Number 7”), was first successfully tested on August 21, 1957. Its success cleared the way for the rocket’s use to launch a satellite.

Dunlop, John B. (1995). The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union had announced their intent to launch an earth satellite in 1957 during the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Fearing that delayed completion of the elaborate scientific satellite, intended as the Soviet IGY contribution, would allow the United States to be first into space, Korolev and his associates designed a much simpler spherical spacecraft. After the success of the R-7 in August, that satellite was rushed into production and became Sputnik 1, the first object put into orbit, on October 4, 1957. A second, larger satellite carrying scientific instruments and the dog Laika, the first living creature in orbit, was launched November 3, 1957. Three Soviet missions, Luna 1–3, explored the vicinity of the moon in 1959, sending back the first images of its far side. Luna 1 was the first spacecraft to fly past the moon; Luna 2, in making a hard landing on the lunar suface, was the first spacecraft to strike another celestial object.

Rees, E. A. (1992). “Party Relations with the Military and the KGB.” In The Soviet Communist Party in Disarray:

Soon after the success of the first Sputniks, Korolev began work on an orbital spacecraft that

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AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; DEMOCRATIZATION;

GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH BIBLIOGRAPHY

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A Soyuz-TM rocket sitting on its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 2, 2000. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS. REPRODUCED

BY PERMISSION.


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could be used both to conduct reconnaissance missions and to serve as a vehicle for the first human space flight missions. The spacecraft was called Vostok when it was used to carry a human into space. The first human was lifted into space in Vostok 1 atop a modified R-7 rocket on April 12, 1961, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The passenger, Yuri Gagarin, was a twenty-sevenyear-old Russian test pilot. There were five additional one-person Vostok missions. In August 1961, Gherman Titov at age twenty-five (still the youngest person ever to fly in space) completed seventeen orbits of Earth in Vostok 2. He became ill during the flight, an incident that caused a one-year delay while Soviet physicians investigated the possibility that humans could not survive for extended times in space. In August 1962, two Vostoks, 3 and 4, were orbited at the same time and came within four miles of one another. This dual mission was repeated in June 1963; aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft was Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to fly in space. As U.S. plans for missions carrying more than one astronaut became known, the Soviet Union worked to maintain its lead in the space race by modifying the Vostok spacecraft to carry as many as three persons. The redesigned spacecraft was known as Voskhod. There were two Voskhod missions. On the second mission in March 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first human to carry out a spacewalk. Korolev began work in 1962 on a secondgeneration spacecraft, called Soyuz, holding as many as three people in an orbital crew compartment, with a separate module for reentry back to Earth. The first launch of Soyuz, with a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, aboard, took place on April 23, 1967. The spacecraft suffered a number of problems, and Komarov became the first person to perish during a space flight. The accident dealt a major blow to Soviet hopes of orbiting or landing on the moon before the United States. After the problems with the Soyuz design were remedied, various models of the spacecraft served the Soviet, and then Russian, program of human space flight for more than thirty years. At the start of the twenty-first century, an updated version of Soyuz was being used as the crew rescue vehicle— the lifeboat—for the early phase of construction and occupancy of the International Space Station.

also made several attempts to convince the Soviet leadership that a cooperative lunar landing program would be a better alternative. But no positive reply came from the Soviet Union, which continued to debate the wisdom of undertaking a lunar program. Meanwhile, separate design bureaus headed by Korolev and Vladimir Chelomei competed fiercely for a lunar mission assignment. In August 1964, Korolev received the lunar landing assignment. The very large rocket that Korolev designed for the lunar landing effort was called the N1. Indecision, inefficiencies, inadequate budgets, and personal and organizational rivalries in the Soviet system posed major obstacles to success in the race to the moon. To this was added the unexpected death of the charismatic leader and organizer Korolev, at age fifty-nine, on January 14, 1966. The Soviet lunar landing program went forward fitfully after 1964. The missions were intended to employ the N1 launch vehicle and a variation of the Soyuz spacecraft, designated L3, that included a lunar landing module designed for one cosmonaut. Although an L3 spacecraft was constructed, the N1 rocket was never successfully launched. After four failed attempts between 1969 and 1972, the N1 program was cancelled in May 1974, thus ending Soviet hopes for human missions to the moon. On July 20, 1969, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped from Apollo II Lunar Module onto the surface of the moon. By 1969, the USSR began to shift its emphasis in human space flight to the development of Earthorbiting stations in which cosmonaut crews could carry out observations and experiments on missions that lasted weeks or months. The first Soviet space station, called Salyut 1, was launched April 19, 1971. Its initial crew spent twenty-three days aboard the station carrying out scientific studies but perished when their Soyuz spacecraft depressurized during reentry. The Soviet Union successfully orbited five more Salyut stations through the mid-1980s. Two of these stations had a military reconnaissance mission, and three were devoted to scientific studies. The Soviet Union also launched guest cosmonauts from allied countries for short stays aboard Salyuts 6 and 7.

While committing the United States in 1961 to winning the moon race, President John F. Kennedy

The Soviet Union followed its Salyut station series with the February 20, 1986, launch of the Mir space station. In 1994–1995, Valery Polyakov spent 438 continuous days aboard the station. More than one hundred people from twelve countries visited

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Mir, including seven American astronauts between 1995 and 1998. The station, which was initially scheduled to operate for only five years, supported human habitation until mid-2000, before making a controlled atmosphere reentry on March 23, 2001.

an added charge, aviation efforts. It later was renamed the Russian Aviation and Space Agency.

The Soviet Union in the 1980s developed a large space launch vehicle, called Energiya, and a reusable space plane similar to the U.S. space shuttle, called Buran. However, the Soviet Union could no longer afford an expensive space program. Energiya was launched only twice, in 1987.

TECHNOLOGY POLICY; SPUTNIK; TSIOLKOVSKY, KON-

To continue its human space flight efforts, Russia in 1993 joined the United States and fourteen other countries in the International Space Station program, the largest ever cooperative technological project. Two Russian cosmonauts were members of the first crew to live aboard the station, arriving in November 2000, and it is intended that at least one cosmonaut will be aboard the station on a permanent basis. Russian hardware plays an important role in the orbiting laboratory. Russia’s role was increased when the U.S. space plane Challenger burned up on entry in February 2003. The Soyuz “lifeboat” became the only way in or out until regular U.S. flights were resumed. In addition, the Soviet Union has carried out a comprehensive program of unmanned space science and application missions for both civilian and national security purposes. Spacecraft were sent to Venus and Mars. Other spacecraft provided intelligence information, early warning of missile attack, and navigation and positioning data, and were used for weather forecasting and telecommunications. In contrast to the United States, the Soviet Union had no space agency. Various design bureaus had influence within the Soviet system, but rivalry among them posed an obstacle to a coherent Soviet space program. The Politburo and the Council of Ministers made policy decisions. After 1965, the government’s Ministry of General Machine Building managed all Soviet space and missile programs; the Ministry of Defense also shaped space efforts. A separate military branch, the Strategic Missile Forces, was in charge of space launchers and strategic missiles. Various institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences proposed and managed scientific missions. After the dissolution of the USSR, Russia created a civilian organization for space activities, the Russian Space Agency, formed in February 1992. It quickly took on increasing responsibility for the management of nonmilitary space activities and, as


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See also:

GAGARIN, YURI ALEXEYEVICH; INTERNATIONAL

SPACE STATION; MIR SPACE STATION; SCIENCE AND STANTIN EDUARDOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dickson, Paul. (2001). Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. New York: Walker. Hall, Rex, and Shayler, David J. (2001). The Rocket Men: Vostok and Voshkod, the First Soviet Manned Spaceflights. New York: Springer Verlag. Harvey, Brian. (2001). Russia in Space: the Failed Frontier? New York: Springer Verlag. Oberg, James. (1981). Red Star in Orbit. New York: Random House. Russian Aviation and Space Agency web site. (2002). . Siddiqi, Asif. (2000). Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. JOHN M. LOGSDON

SPANISH CIVIL WAR In July 1936, after months of unrest and politically motivated assassinations, a junta of nationalist generals, including Francisco Franco, led an uprising against the Spanish Republic. When Franco had difficulty transporting his forces from Africa to Spain, he appealed for aid from Germany and Italy. Hitler and Mussolini were only too happy to oblige. The Republicans also asked for help from the Western powers and the Soviet Union. Britain, France, and the United States decided to adopt a strict policy of nonintervention, but Josef Stalin began secretly supplying the Republic with the weapons it needed to survive. Soviet aid, however, came with a price. Stalin provided thousands of Red Army, NKVD, and GRU (secret police) officers who often furthered his aims while acting as advisers for the Republicans. Meanwhile the Spanish government shipped its vast gold reserves to Moscow, where the Soviets deducted the cost of armaments for the war, at exorbitant prices, from the bullion. Yet without Soviet tanks and

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airplanes it is certain that the Republic would have fallen much more quickly than it did.

Howson, Gerald. (1998). Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War. London: J. Murray.

Stalin and the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party wanted a say over the political future of Spain. From the start of the war, the Soviets pushed the Republicans to eliminate anyone who did not follow the party line. This hunt for Trotskyists was tolerated by the Republican governments in order to retain the favor of their only great power supporter. Most Spanish leaders, however, were able to resist Soviet attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of their country, and steered their own course during the war.

Radosh, Ronald, and Habeck, Mary R., eds. (2001). Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

The Soviet Union and the Comintern also took a direct hand in combat. The European Left sent more than 30,000 enthusiastic volunteers to fight for the Republicans, some of whom came to Spain to support a revolution, on the model of the Soviet Union, while others wanted only to defend democracy. A large number of the commanders for these International Brigades were regular Red Army officers, although their origins were disguised and never acknowledged by the Soviet Union. The Internationals, and armaments sent by the Soviets, were critical for the Republicans’ successful defense of Madrid in December 1936. The Republican cause also benefited from Soviet and International participation in other engagements, including the battle of Jarama in February 1937 and the defeat of Italian troops at Guadalajara in March 1937, while Soviet tank operators and pilots were of crucial importance throughout the war.

The twentieth century saw a great upsurge in the interest in and use of military special forces, both in war and for peacekeeping, antiterrorist, and other missions. The Soviets were ardent advocates of such forces, and created many, tasked with a large and varied array of missions. This reflected three main considerations. First of all, small, highly motivated and well-trained units were vital to carry out operations beyond the capabilities of the USSR’s mass conscript army, which demanded speed, precision, or finesse. Secondly, the Soviets approached warfare in an intensely political way, seeing the aim as being not necessarily to win on the battlefield, but to destroy the enemy’s will and ability to fight in the first place. Special forces could play a key role in this. Thirdly, the Soviets regarded their armed forces also as integrated elements of their apparatus of rule, and specialized forces emerged to meet particular needs that had less to do with war-fighting but political control. The post-Soviet regime has upheld this tradition. Indeed, the proportion of special purpose units within the Russian military actually increased, not least because at a time when the majority of the armed forces were virtually unusable, at least these elements retained the discipline, training, and morale to fight.

Of the Soviet soldiers who saw action in the Spanish arena, dozens were recalled to Moscow and executed during the military purges of 1937–1939. At the same time others, such as Konstantin Rokossovsky, Ivan Konev, Alexander Rodimtsev, and Nikolai Kuznetsov, had brilliant careers during World War II and after.

Thomas, Hugh. (1977). The Spanish Civil War. New York: Harper and Row. MARY R. HABECK

SPECIAL PURPOSE FORCES

Alpert, Michael. (1994). A New International History of the Spanish Civil War. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

Special forces of a fashion had existed during the civil war (1918–1921), including the elite Latvian Rifles who guarded Vladimir Lenin, but these units tended to be essentially ad hoc elements of Bolshevik militants and Cossack horsemen. They subsequently either dissolved or were incorporated into the Red Army or police, losing their identity and élan in the process. The true genesis of Soviet special purpose forces took place in 1930, when the USSR became only the second nation in history to experiment with a military parachute drop. Excited by the possibilities, the Soviet high command immediately began training paratroop units: The first battalions were formed a year later.

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In the end, Soviet aid could not alter the outcome of the war. As the international climate worsened, Stalin decided to withdraw support for the Spanish government in 1938 and by the end of the year could only offer his condolences as the Republic faced utter defeat.

See also:

COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL; STALIN, JOSEF

VISSARIONOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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This was the genesis of the Air Assault Troops, this also led to the rise of true special purpose forces. After all, while the paratroopers and other formations such as the Naval Infantry (marines) were a cut above the regular conscript infantry, they could hardly be considered “special forces” in the modern sense of the term. As the army began raising its paratroop forces, so too smaller, more specialized units began to be created within them, given the name Special Designation forces (Spetsialnogo naznacheniya, Spetsnaz for short). Elite units were also formed by the NKVD, the political police force (which had a sizable parallel army of paramilitaries), that instead called its forces Osnaz, for Osobennogo naznachneniya, or Specialized Designation. During World War II, these forces would see extensive action. Army and navy reconnaissance commandos penetrated German lines and, along with NKVD Osnaz saboteurs and infiltrators, organized partisan units, targeted collaborators and attacked supply routes.

prestige to have such units, so they have also been joined by such new units as the Justice Ministry’s Fakel commando team (which specializes in breaking prison sieges). Thus, if anything, special purpose forces are becoming even more important in the post-Soviet era.

This duality continued after the war and into the post-Soviet era. The armed forces maintain substantial Spetsnaz forces under the overall command of the GRU, military intelligence. Their main roles are to operate behind enemy lines gathering intelligence and launching surprise attacks on strategic assets such as headquarters and nuclear weapons. There are eight brigades of regular Spetsnaz and four of Naval Spetsnaz. However, most of these ostensibly elite units are still largely manned by conscripts, albeit the pick of the draft. There is thus an elite within the elite, largely made up of professional soldiers. Generally a single company within each brigade is kept at this standard, as well as a company in each of the paratroop divisions. These elements include athletes and linguists trained to pass themselves off as nationals of target nations and are genuinely comparable to such units as the U.S. Green Berets or British SAS.

Zaloga, Steven. (1995). Inside the Blue Berets. Novato, CA: Presidio.

Meanwhile, the security apparatus also retains its own smaller Osnaz elements. The KGB created several specialized teams, including Alfa (an antiterrorist strike force), Zenit and Vympel (trained for secret missions abroad), and Kaskad (a covert intelligence team). All served during the war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), and all survived the end of the USSR and the dismemberment of the KGB, being attached to new, Russian security agencies. The same is true of the Osnaz elements within the Interior Troops and the security arm of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as well as the Border Troops. Indeed, it has become almost a mark of institutional


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See also:

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE; STATE SECURITY, OR-

GANS OF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Galeotti, Mark. (1992). “Special and Intervention Forces of the Former Soviet Union.” Jane’s Intelligence Review 4:438-440. Schofield, Carey. (1993). The Russian Elite. London: Greenhill. Strekhnin, Yuri. (1996). Commandos from the Sea. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Suvorov, Viktor. (1987). Spetsnaz. London: Hamish Hamilton.

MARK GALEOTTI

SPERANSKY, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH (1772–1839), Russian statesman, one-time adviser to Tsar Alexander I. Mikhail Speransky attempted during the years 1807–1811 to influence the Russian monarch in the direction of instituting major political reform in Russia’s government. Only a few of his carefully drafted plans ever saw the light of day. Born into a family of a poor Russian Orthodox clergyman, Speransky, called by one Russian historian a “self-made man,” won the attention of the tsar and rose to become a count. He was considered brilliant and well-read in the study of European governmental structures, becoming in effect Alexander’s unofficial prime minister. Working in secret (on the tsar’s orders), he drew up a number of reforms. His idea, which the tsar evidently did not wholly endorse, was to retain a strong monarchy but reform it so that it would be based strictly on law and legal procedures of the type found in some European monarchies of the time. Speransky’s reform plans did not closely resemble, say, the English or French governmental

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systems. Yet while Speransky could probably not be considered a liberal reformer on West European terms, by Russian standards his reformism bordered on the radical. This made Speransky extremely unpopular with the tsar’s court, causing the tsar to keep such plans under wraps lest they unduly alienate his court. In 1809 and 1812, Speransky drew up the draft of a Russian constitution that bore some resemblance to those of West European monarchies. In one of his projects Speransky even proposed separation of the powers of legislature (in the Duma), judiciary, and the governmental administration. Yet all three were to branch out from the crown. Suffrage would be based on property, at least in the beginning. Election of the Duma would be indirect and necessitate a cautious, four-stage electoral process. Speransky also supported a program for future abolition of serfdom in Russia, reform that he viewed as crucial for any serious top-tobottom governmental change. Historians note that certain measures enacted in 1810–1811 brought “fundamental change to the executive departments of government.” Personal responsibility, it is noted, was to be imposed on ministers, while the functions of executive departments were precisely delimited. Unwarranted interference with legislative and judicial functions would be eliminated. Comprehensive rules were actually enacted for the administration of the ministries. Although Speransky’s efforts to reform the antiquated Russian court system failed, his administrative reforms overall modernized the whole bureaucratic machine. These structures remained in effect until the Bolshevik coup d’état, or October Revolution, of late 1917. After serving as the tsar’s close adviser for some five years, Speransky left St. Petersburg as the appointed Governor-General of the Siberian region. In that post he continued to author reform plans. Some of these were adopted and changed the governmental structure of that large administrative area. But it was in the period of his service as the tsar’s adviser that Speransky made his name in the annals of Russian history, especially as recounted by the famous early nineteenth-century Russian historian, Nikolai M. Karamzin. In 1821 Speransky returned to the Russian capital to become a founder of the Siberian Committee for Russian Affairs Beyond the Urals.

See also:

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raeff, Marc. (1956). Siberia and the Reform of 1822. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Raeff, Marc. (1957). Michael Speransky, Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. (1963). A History of Russia. New York: Oxford University Press. ALBERT L. WEEKS

SPIRIDONOVA, MARIA ALEXANDROVNA (1884–1941), Socialist Revolutionary terrorist and Left Socialist Revolutionary leader who spent most of her life in prison or exile because of her popular appeal as a revolutionary heroine. Maria Spiridonova, daughter of a non-hereditary noble in Tambov Province, became a public symbol of heroic martyrdom during the first Russian revolution of 1905–1907. In January 1906 she shot provincial councilor G. N. Luzhenovsky at the Borisoglebsk Railroad Station, carrying out the death sentence that the Tambov Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) had passed on Luzhenovsky for his cruel suppression of peasant unrest in the district. Spiridonova’s case excited national interest, thus distinguishing her from the many other SR terrorists throughout the empire. A letter Spiridonova wrote from prison was published in a liberal newspaper and debated widely in the national press because it described her torture at the hands of police officials, hinting as well at sexual abuse. Liberal newspapers in particular waxed eloquent about the brutalities inflicted on this beautiful and chaste young woman of the Russian upper classes who had killed a sadistic bureaucrat. In March 1906, however, a court-martial sentenced Spiridonova to hanging, then commuted her sentence to life imprisonment, the usual practice in cases of females convicted of political crimes until mid-1906. Eleven years of incarceration in the Nerchinsk penal complex in Siberia followed, during which Spiridonova suffered from depression, nervous prostration, and frequent flareups of tuberculosis, her chronic illness. The Provisional Government’s amnesty of all political prisoners shortly after the February Revolution allowed Spiridonova to return to European Russia in the spring of 1917. Here she was welcomed, given her reputation as heroine and martyr, into the highest level of revolutionary politics in Petrograd and Moscow.


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March 1918. But when Russian concessions to Germany led to a food supply crisis that the Bolsheviks attempted to resolve with stringent grain-procurement measures in May, Spiridonova repudiated the treaty along with Bolshevik policy. She took a leading role in planning the Left SRs’ assassination of the German ambassador, an attempt to break the treaty and spark a popular uprising that was aborted by the Bolsheviks in July. With her party’s consequent banishment from Soviet politics, a second martyrdom began for Spiridonova. From 1920 on she lived either in prison, under house arrest, in Central Asian exile, or in sanatoria, up to her execution on Josef Stalin’s orders during the German invasion in 1941.

See also:

BREST-LITOVSK PEACE; LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLU-

TIONARIES; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; TERRORISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rabinowitch, Alexander. (1995). “Maria Spiridonova’s ‘Last Testament.’” Russian Review 54(3):424–446. Radkey, Oliver H. (1958). The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917. New York: Columbia University Press.

Maria Spiridonova endorsed violence for revolutionary goals and was a leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. BROWN BROTHERS. REPRODUCED

Steinberg, Isaac. (1935). Spiridonova: Revolutionary Terrorist. tr. and eds. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher. London: Methuen.

BY PERMISSION.

As a leader of the Left SR Party, Spiridonova employed the aura of her martyrdom, along with her personal charisma and oratorical skills, to sway peasants, workers, and soldiers against the Provisional Government and to popularize the October Revolution. While she did not hold an official post in the first Soviet government, a Bolshevik-Left SR coalition, she was elected chairperson of the Peasant Section of the Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of the second, third, and fourth Soviet Congresses. Indeed it was her lifelong concern for the peasants and their welfare that ultimately turned Spiridonova against the Bolsheviks. Spiridonova had been an early supporter of Vladimir Lenin’s push to sign a separate peace with Germany, however punitive, because the Russian population was opposed to continuing the war. She adhered to this position despite her party’s objections to the “shameful” Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and withdrawal from the government in protest in


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Radkey, Oliver H. (1963). The Sickle under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule. New York: Columbia University Press.

R U S S I A N

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SALLY A. BONIECE

SPIRITUAL ELDERS The spiritual elder (starets in Russian, geron in Greek) first appeared in the earliest days of monasticism in Asia Minor. Some elders had far-ranging reputations and attracted other monks who emulated their way of life, sought their counsel, and profited from their experience in acquiring the Holy Spirit. One of the signs of the Spirit is the gift of discernment (diorasis), which means, first, knowledge of the mysteries of God, and, second, an understanding of the secrets of the heart. One who has the gift of discernment can undertake the spiritual direction of others. In the opinion of some Eastern writers, the same gift allows the Spirit to work miracles through the God-bearing practitioners of perfect prayer.

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In fourteenth-century Byzantium the spiritual elder became central to the hesychast movement associated with Gregory Palamas (1296–1359). The hesychasts combined the practice of the so-called Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”) with the doctrine of theosis, or deification. Mount Athos became their chief center, and from there eldership spread to the Slavic world, producing Russia’s most famous medieval spiritual elder, Nil (Maikov, 1433–1508). After a long period of decline, eldership revived first in Ukraine and then in Russia through the efforts of several remarkable elders: Paisy (Velichkovsky, 1722–1794), translator of the Philokalia, a basic collection of texts on pure prayer; Serafim (Mashnin, 1758–1833) of Sarov, Russia’s most important modern saint; and Amvrosy (Grenkov, 1812–1891), the hermit model for Elder Zosima in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The popular impact of eldership is recorded in a remarkable anonymous work, The Pilgrim’s Tale. By 1900, the contemplative renaissance had reached its peak, although its creative power could still be seen in the lives of the parish priest John (Sergiev, 1829–1908) of Kronstadt and Mother Yekaterina (1850–1925) of Lesna, who worked among the poor.

See also:

BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; MONASTICISM;

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nichols, Robert L. (1985). “The Orthodox Elders (Startsy) of Imperial Russia.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 1:1–30. Pentkovsky, Aleksei, ed. (1999). The Pilgrim’s Tale. New York: Paulist Press. ROBERT L. NICHOLS

SPORTS POLICY The Soviet Olympic program, which would produce more medalists than any other country from 1952 through 1992, got off to a slow start internationally. Early Soviet contacts with foreign competitors were sparse, as the Soviet Union avoided international federations in the 1920s and stayed out of the Olympics, which it regarded as a means of turning workers’ attention from the class struggle and of preparing them for war. This was paralleled domestically by the banning of bourgeois from sports societies.

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In a 1929 resolution, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union condemned what it called “record mania.” However, by the 1930s party slogans began to call for breaking bourgeois sports records. After World War II, the Soviet Union, perhaps because it now could compete with the capitalist countries on an even footing, began an effort to do so and thereby to demonstrate the virtues of its social system. Accordingly, beginning in 1946 Soviet sports associations joined international federations, including, in 1951, the International Olympic Committee. By 1946, weightlifter Grigory Novak became the first Soviet world champion in any sport, and in December 1948, the Central Committee explicitly stated as a goal the achievement of “world supremacy in the major sports in the immediate future.” At first the Soviet Union participated mainly in sports in which it had a good chance to win, but at the 1952 Summer Olympics Soviet athletes competed in all sports except field hockey. The Soviet Union first participated in the Winter Olympics in 1956. The Soviet drive to surpass the capitalist countries could not always override domestic political considerations. In the late 1940s, some athletes who had competed against foreigners before the war were arrested. Purges, including executions, occurred in 1950, some as part of the anticosmopolitan campaign carried out by the government. Similarly, many officials and athletes had been victims of the purges of the 1930s. REASONS FOR SOVIET SUCCESS

One likely reason for the rise of Soviet sports was the urbanization of the country. As elsewhere, sport in the Soviet Union was predominantly urban and remained so even after the Soviet government began to push rural sport in 1948. As late as 1972, it was reported that only ten of the 507 Soviet athletes at the Munich Olympics belonged to rural sports clubs. This was partly a result of rural attitudes and partly because of lack of facilities. Another reason for Soviet successes was the relative lack of disapproval of women athletes, a phenomenon matched in Soviet society by the presence of women in heavy labor, both urban and rural. For example, Soviet domination of bilateral track and field competitions with the United States—the Soviets won eleven of thirteen from 1958 to 1975— was largely due to the superior athleticism of Soviet women, as they defeated the American women


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Soviet athletes perform as part of the celebrations for Moscow’s 800th birthday in 1947. © YEVGENY KHALDEI/CORBIS

twelve times while Soviet men won only three times. Thus it was for practical as well as propaganda reasons that in 1956 and 1960 the Soviet Union proposed the expansion of the Olympic program, especially to include more women. On the other hand, just as sexism coexisted with celebration of women’s achievements in Soviet society, for a long time there was Soviet opposition to female participation in such allegedly harmful sports as soccer, judo, and karate. The Soviets also looked for special opportunities to excel, as when they made a concerted (and successful) effort to field an Olympic champion in team handball when that sport was introduced into the Olympics. TRAINING PROGRAMS

Domestically there were a number of programs designed to encourage athletic talent. Perhaps the best known was GTO (Gotov k Trudu i Oborone—Prepared for Labor and Defense), which was established in 1931 and granted badges of various kinds to people in different age brackets who had achieved certain government-set athletic goals. As in other areas


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of Soviet life, quotas were set for the earning of badges, and also as in other areas of Soviet life, the setting of quotas often led to falsification of results, in this case leading to the granting of unearned awards. Stricter, no doubt, were the standards for the All-Union Sports Classification System established in 1949 with its five categories. At the top was Merited (Zasluzhenny) Master of Sport, followed by Master of Sport, then Classes A, B, and C. Masters of Sport were expected not only to achieve but also to serve as political and ideological examples and to pass on their experience to younger athletes. On a national scale, elite athletes were showcased in the Spartakiads. The first Spartakiad was held in 1928, to be revived on a regular basis in 1956, then held quadrennially from 1959. By 1963 the Soviet Union already had fifteen institutes of physical education and a much larger number of special secondary schools (tekhnikumy) as well as departments of physical education at pedagogical institutes and schools. There were also scientific research institutes in Moscow, Leningrad,

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and Tiflis. Despite this, physical education instructors often complained that their subject was given insufficient emphasis in schools compared with academic subjects. Moreover, N. Norman Shneidman has described physical education in Soviet schools as “generally poor,” contrasting this with the excellent boarding schools, extended day schools, regular sport schools, clubs, and organizations for the best school-age athletes. The special schools were introduced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Graduate departments of the leading institutes of higher learning were responsible for developing methods of training and new equipment and wrote most of the physical education textbooks and reference books. In addition, many leaders and coaches of Soviet national teams had advanced degrees and authored scholarly publications. Under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union showed a renewed willingness to learn from the West after the extreme xenophobia of the late Stalin years. Sports was no exception here, as the Soviets invited the American Olympic weightlifting champion Tommy Kono to the Soviet Union in order to interview and film him. The Soviets accorded similar treatment to speed skater Eric Heiden in the late 1970s. In turn, the Soviet Union aided other countries, furthering propaganda goals in the process, by providing training, camps, facilities, and equipment to athletes from Africa and Asia, often for free. Soviet coaches also shared their expertise with other socialist countries, some of which surpassed the Soviet Union in certain sports and went on to send their own coaches to other countries. A notable example of this is Bulgaria in weightlifting. During glasnost there was considerable criticism of the regimentation of child athletes. Specialization and rigorous training occurred as early as age five, and former Olympic weightlifting champion and future member of Parliament Yuri Vlasov referred to “inhuman forms of professionalism” among twelve- and thirteen-year-old gymnasts, swimmers, and other athletes. Young teenagers often had to spend considerable time away from their families and had to choose a specialty at this young age. However, it should be noted that these phenomena also existed in the United States. GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIZATION OF ATHLETES

teurism, occurred as early as the 1930s. By 1945 the Council of People’s Commissars established a system that paid cash bonuses for records. In May 1951, in their successful attempt to gain admission to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Soviet delegates to an IOC meeting falsely stated that bonuses were no longer paid. Many of the athletes were employed by the three largest sports organizations, Dinamo (Dynamo), run by the security forces; the Soviet Army; and Spartak, run by the trade unions. As in other countries, rival sport societies often lured athletes away from other societies. The best athletes were freed from military and other duties so that they could devote full time to their sports. The result was that Soviet athletes enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, at least while they were bringing glory to the state; after they retired, their standard of living often declined steeply. Of course it was forbidden for Soviets, whether journalists, athletes, or anyone else, to discuss any of this publicly. Whatever internal politics (e.g., cronyism) may also have been involved, another phenomenon not unknown in the United States, selection to international teams was based primarily on the likelihood that the athlete would place highly, irrespective of recent victories in national championships. The final selection would be made on the basis of the athlete’s condition at training camp before departure for the competition. Supporting this sporting activity for both practitioners and fans was an extensive Soviet press dedicated to sport. Sovetsky Sport was the most prominent among over a dozen Soviet sports newspapers and periodicals. The publishing house Fizkultura i sport, founded in 1923, published 40 percent of all Soviet titles on sports. According to certain unofficial Soviet sources, articles submitted for publication in scholarly journals were carefully screened to keep important research findings from the Soviets’ competitors. SCARCITY OF RESOURCES

Despite their outstanding success, the Soviets often lacked resources. As late as 1989 there were only 2,500 swimming pools in the Soviet Union, compared with more than one million in the United States. There were shortages of gynmasiums and equipment, and many schools lacked athletic play areas.

Soviet government subsidization of elite athletes, notorious during the era of allegedly pure ama-

Preference for elites over the masses sometimes provoked popular resentment alongside national

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Soviet athletes march through Red Square during the “physical culture” portion of a May Day parade. © HULTON ARCHIVE

pride. Even Soviet leaders were sometimes critical of the neglect of mass physical fitness in favor of elite athletes, although obviously the latter were too valuable for propaganda purposes for the situation to be changed. At the same time, facilities, equipment, and sports clothing were sometimes lacking even for elites, leading to relative Soviet weakness in downhill skiing, for example. Moreover, Soviet athletes often found it necessary to use foreign equipment in international competition. Sports historian Robert Edelman has praised the Soviets for “using limited resources efficiently,” pointing out that Soviet Olympic victories were achieved “on a shoestring.”


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In addition to demonstrating their athletic superiority, the Soviets used sports internationally to make political statements. The Soviet Union was among the leaders in isolating South Africa from international sport because of its policy of apartheid. It also canceled bilateral track and field meets with the United States from 1966 through 1968, giving the Vietnam War as the reason. The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, on the other hand, was almost certainly intended as retaliation for the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which had protested the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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Even before the American boycott, however, the Soviet Union had already seen the political implications of hosting the Olympics. For example, one of the members of the USSR Olympic Organizing Committee was G. P. Goncharov, the head of the Communist Party propaganda machine. Moreover, in the fall of 1979 the government arrested dissidents and warned other people who complained even mildly about conditions. In Moscow there was a campaign to remove drunks, the unemployed, and even teenagers and children from the city during the Olympics. CONCLUSION

Soviet sports actually survived the Soviet Union in a sense, as in the 1992 Olympics athletes from the former Soviet Union competed together on what was known as the Unified Team. Although afterward the separate independent nations fielded separate teams, the memory persisted into 1996, as some Russian newspapers could not resist a brief mention that, added together, the former Soviet republics combined for the highest number of medals of any country. Economic problems would persist for the former Soviet sports programs, sometimes interfering with athletes’ training, but so would national pride and excellence, as the Russian Federation, for example, won 88 medals, second only to the United States with its larger population, in the 2000 Summer Olympics.

See also:

MOSCOW OLYMPICS OF 1980

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Booker, Christopher. (1981). The Games War: A Moscow Journal. London: Faber and Faber. Edelman, Robert. (1993). Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR. New York: Oxford University Press. Morton, Henry W. (1963). Soviet Sport: Mirror of Soviet Society. New York: Collier Books. Peppard, Victor, and Riordan, James. (1993). Playing Politics: Soviet Sport Diplomacy to 1992. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

SPUTNIK On October 4, 1957, Soviet space scientists launched the first manmade Sputnik, or satellite, to orbit the earth. Sputnik had great significance on several counts. It indicated that the USSR was a world leader in science and engineering. It was a great propaganda achievement, enabling the nation’s leaders to claim both scientific preeminence and the superiority of the Soviet social system. Sputnik also triggered the space race, as the United States and the USSR committed to an expansive effort to be the first in a series of other space firsts. The USSR followed Sputnik with several other achievements: the first man in space (Yuri Gargarin); the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova); the first two-person and three-person orbital flights; the first space walk; and so on. Sputnik also revealed that the USSR was or would soon be capable of launching intercontinental ballistic missiles. Sputnik was important to the Soviet people as well. It demonstrated to them that after years of sacrifice under Stalin the nation was truly on the road to communism based on the achievements of science. Tens of thousands of citizens gathered in the evenings to track Sputnik through the sky, using binoculars or amateur radios to pick up its signal. School children sang odes to Sputnik; poets wrote poems to Sputnik. Sputnik was only the first Soviet satellite: More than 2,700 others followed into space. While their primary purposes were military, they also served such ends as communication, meteorology, and global prospecting.

See also:

GAGARIN, YURI ALEXEYEVICH; SPACE PROGRAM; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McDougall, Walter A. (1985). The Heavens and the Earth. New York: Basic Books. PAUL R. JOSEPHSON

Riordan, James. (1977). Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shneidman, N. Norman. (1978). The Soviet Road to Olympus: Theory and Practice of Soviet Physical Culture and Sport. Toronto: The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. VICTOR ROSENBERG

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STAKHANOVITE MOVEMENT On August 31, 1935, Aleksei Stakhanov, a thirtyyear-old miner in the Donets Basin, hewed 102 tons of coal during his six-hour shift. This amount represented fourteen times his quota, and within a few


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days his feat was hailed by Pravda as a world record. Anxious to celebrate and reward individuals’ achievements in production that could serve as stimuli to other workers, the party launched the Stakhanovite movement. The title of Stakhanovite, conferred on workers and peasants who set production records or otherwise demonstrated mastery of their assigned tasks, quickly superseded that of shockworker. Day by day throughout the autumn of 1935, the campaign intensified, culminating in an All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites in industry and transportation that met in the Kremlin in November. At the conference, outstanding Stakhanovites mounted the podium to recount how, defying their quotas and often the skepticism of their workmates and bosses, they applied new techniques of production to achieve stupendous results for which they were rewarded with wages that reached dizzying heights. Josef Stalin captured the upbeat mood of the conference when, by way of explaining how such records were only possible in the land of socialism, he uttered the phrase, “Life has become better, and happier too.” Widely disseminated, and even set to song, Stalin’s words served as the motto of the movement. The Stakhanovite movement thus encompassed lessons not only about how to work, but also about how to live. In addition to providing a model for success on the shop floor, it conjured up images of the good life. Many of the same qualities Stakhanovites were supposed to exhibit in the one sphere—cleanliness, neatness, preparedness, and a keenness for learning—were applicable to the other. These qualities were associated with kulturnost (culturedness), the acquisition of which marked the individual as a New Soviet Man or Woman. Advertisements for perfume, articles about Stakhanovites on shopping sprees, photographs of Stakhanovites sharing their happiness with their families, newsreels showing them driving new automobiles—presented to them as gifts—and moving into comfortable apartments all symbolized kulturnost. Wives of male Stakhanovites had an important part to play in the movement as helpmates preparing nutritious meals, keeping their apartments clean and comfortable, and otherwise creating a cultured environment in the home so that their husbands were well-rested and eager to work with great energy. It was also important to demonstrate that Stakhanovites were admired by their comrades and considered worthy of holding public office. Notwithstanding the enormous publicity surrounding Stakhanovites and their achievements,


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they were not necessarily popular. Even before the raising of output norms in early 1936, workers who had not been favored with the best conditions, and consequently struggled to fulfill their norms, expressed resentment of Stakhanovites by verbally and even physically abusing them. Foremen and engineers, only too well aware that record mania and the provision of special conditions for Stakhanovites created disruptions in production and bottlenecks in supplies, also on occasion sabotaged the movement. At least that was the accusation made against many who often served as scapegoats for the failure of the Stakhanovite movement to fulfill its promise of unleashing the productive forces of the country. Nevertheless, the Stakhanovite movement continued into the war and even enjoyed something of a revival in the postwar years, when it was exported to Eastern Europe.

See also:

INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; KULTURNOST; SO-

VIET MAN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Siegelbaum, Lewis H. (1988). Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941. New York: Cambridge University Press. Thurston, Robert. (1993). “The Stakhanovite Movement: The Background to the Great Terror in the Factories, 1935–1938.” In Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, eds. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning. New York: Cambridge University Press. LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM

STALIN CONSTITUTION See

CONSTITUTION OF

1936.

STALINGRAD, BATTLE OF The Battle of Stalingrad (July 17, 1942–February 2, 1943) was the most significant Red Army victory during World War II. It included the Red Army’s defense against Operation “Blau” (Blue), the German Army’s summer 1942 advance to Stalingrad, and offensive operations in the fall of 1942 and winter of 1943 to defeat German and other Axis forces in the Stalingrad region. The defensive phase of the battle began on July 17, after German Army Groups “A” and “B” smashed the defenses of the Red Army’s Briansk,

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A Red Army soldier waves a flag while trucks gather in the square below during the Battle of Stalingrad. © HULTON ARCHIVE

Southwestern, and Southern Fronts in southern Russia and advanced to the Don River west of Stalingrad. Initially, the newly formed Stalingrad Front, commanded by marshal of the Soviet Union S. K. Timoshenko, defended the Stalingrad region with the 21st, 62d, 63d, 64th, and 57th Armies, the 1st and 4th Tank Armies, and the 8th Air Army, which opposed the 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army of Army Group “B.” After overwhelming the 62nd and 64th Army’s defenses west of the Don River in late July and defeating a major counterstroke by the 1st and 4th Tank Armies, in late August General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army broke through Soviet defenses along the Don River and reached the Volga River north of Stalingrad, while General Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army reached the city’s southwestern suburbs. The twin blows isolated the Soviet 62d and 64th Armies in Stalingrad and initiated two months of vicious and costly fighting for possession of the city. The fighting consumed the bulk of German forces and forced them to deploy weak Italian and Rumanian armies along their

overextended flanks north and south of the city. While Stalin fed enough forces into Stalingrad to tie German forces down, the Stavka planned a counteroffensive, Operation “Uranus,” orchestrated by General A. M. Vasilevsky, to encircle and destroy Axis forces at Stalingrad.

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The offensive phase of the battle commenced on November 19, 1942, when the forces of General N. F. Vatutin’s and A. I. Eremenko’s Southwestern and Stalingrad Fronts pierced Axis defenses north and south of the city and joined west of Stalingrad on November 23, encircling more than 300,000 German and Rumanian forces in the city. Offensives by the Southwestern and Stalingrad Fronts along the Chir, Don, and Aksai Rivers in December destroyed the Italian 8th Army and frustrated two German attempts to rescue their forces besieged in Stalingrad. On February 2, 1943, after Bryansk, Voronezh, Southwestern, and Southern (former Stalingrad) Front forces attacked westward from the Don River and toward Rostov, General K. K.

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Rokossovsky’s Don Front defeated and captured Paulus’s 6th Army and almost 100,000 men. At a cost of more than one million casualties, including almost 500,000 dead, missing, or captured, during the battle the Red Army destroyed or badly damaged five Axis armies, including two German, totaling more than fifty divisions, and killed or captured more than 600,000 Axis troops. The unprecedented German defeat was a turning point indicative of eventual Red Army victory in the war.

See also:

WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beevor, Antony. (1998). Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1941–1943. New York: Viking Erickson, John. (1975). The Road to Stalingrad. New York: Harper & Row. Glantz, David M. (1995). When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. DAVID M. GLANTZ

STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH (1879–1953), general secretary of the Communist Party, Soviet dictator. Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who in revolutionary work was called Koba before adopting the nom de plume Stalin, was born in Gori, Georgia, to a working-class family; his father was a cobbler and his mother a domestic servant. Many of the details of his early life remain in dispute, but his education was gained at a local church school and the Tiflis (Tbilisi in Georgian) Orthodox seminary, from which he was expelled in 1899. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party soon after its foundation, and in 1901 was elected to the Tiflis Social Democratic Committee. Following the split in the party in 1903, Stalin became a Bolshevik. For the following decade and a half, he was involved in a variety of revolutionary activities, including the publication of illegal materials, organizational work among workers and within the party, and bank raids to garner funds to sustain party work. He met Vladimir Lenin in 1905, and briefly traveled abroad on party business to Stockholm, London, Kracow, and Vienna. In 1912


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he was elected in his absence onto the party Central Committee and became an editor of the party newspaper, Pravda. In 1913 he wrote his most important early work, Marxism and the National Question. His revolutionary work was interrupted by arrest in 1902, 1909, 1912, and 1913; he escaped from the first three bouts of exile and returned to Petrograd from the last one when the tsar fell in February 1917. In 1903 he married his first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, his son Yakov was born in 1904, and his wife died of tuberculosis in 1907. When Stalin returned to Petrograd soon after the tsar’s fall, he was one of the leading Bolsheviks in the city. He was elected to the newly established Russian bureau of the party and to the editorial board of Pravda. Along with Vyacheslav Molotov and Lev Kamenev, he championed the policy of support for the Provisional Government and a defensist position on the war, until Vladimir Lenin returned in April and overturned these in favor of a more revolutionary stance. Stalin went along with Lenin’s views. During the revolutionary period, Stalin seems to have spent most of his time on organizational work. He was not a stirring speaker like Trotsky or someone with the presence of Lenin, and therefore after the return of Lenin and the emigrés, he was not seen as one of the leading lights of the party. Nevertheless, following the seizure of power in October, Stalin became people’s commissar for nationalities, a position that from April 1919 he held jointly with the post of people’s commissar of state control (from February 1920, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate). The latter post was concerned with the elimination of corruption and inefficiency in the central state machine. During the civil war, Stalin was active on a series of military fronts, and it was at this time that his first major clash with Leon Trotsky occurred. More importantly, when the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat of the Central Committee were established in March 1919, Stalin became a member of all three. He was the only member simultaneously of these bodies and the CC, and was therefore in a place of significant organizational power. In April 1922 he was elected general secretary of the party, and therefore the formal head of the party’s organizational machine. With Lenin’s illness from May 1922 and his death in January 1924, Stalin was able to make use of this power to consolidate his control at the top of the party structure. Lenin’s death was followed by intensified factional conflict among his would-be successors.

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revolutionary attempt to build socialism, were two of the most important of such policies. Thus through a combination of the weaknesses of his opponents, the strength of his organizational power, and the attractiveness of many of the positions he espoused, Stalin was able to triumph over his more fancied rivals for leadership; he was even able to overcome the negative evaluation of him in Lenin’s so-called Testament.

Josef Stalin in January 1946. ASSOCIATED PRESS. REPRODUCED

BY

PERMISSION.

Between 1923 and 1929, Stalin and his supporters successively outmaneuvered Trotsky and his supporters, the Left Opposition, the United Opposition, and the Right Opposition, so that by the end of the decade, Stalin was primus inter pares. Stalin’s success in these factional conflicts has usually been attributed to the organizational powers stemming from his ability to use the machinery of the party to promote his supporters and exclude the supporters of his opponents. This was clearly a significant factor in his ability to outflank his opponents at party meetings and use those symbolically to defeat them through a party vote. Stalin was the source of jobs, and therefore someone who was attractive to many with ambitions in Soviet politics. But Stalin was also a person who espoused the sorts of policies that would have appealed to many rankand-file Bolsheviks: The ability of the USSR to build socialism in one country rather than having to wait for international revolution and the need to shift from the gradualist framework of NEP into a more

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Stalin’s defeat of his more prominent rivals did not mean that he was secure in the leadership of the party in the early 1930s. At the end of 1927, at Stalin’s behest the party adopted the first of a series of decisions that led to the abandonment of the moderation of the New Economic Policy and its replacement by an increasingly rapid pace of industrialization and agricultural collectivization. This produced continuing strains within the party, even when the most prominent opponents of this new course—the Right Opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky— had been defeated in 1929. In late 1930 the SyrtsovLominadze group and in 1932 the Ryutin Platform were two important instances of high-ranking party members criticizing the course of economic policy, with the latter even calling for Stalin’s removal. For many within the party’s leading ranks, the gamble on forced pace industrialization and agricultural collectivization, while justifiable in terms of the achievement of the ultimate goal of a socialist society, was in practice proving to be more costly and disruptive than they had been led to believe. The reports of widespread popular opposition to collectivization raised the specter of the increased isolation of the party within the society; the trials of so-called saboteurs in 1930 and 1931 only increased this sense. They were not reassured by the increasing glorification of Stalin personally that began on his fiftieth birthday in December 1929. The cult of Stalin that thus emerged was clearly an attempt to shift the basis of political legitimacy away from the party and onto the person of Stalin. At this time of political uncertainty, in November 1932 Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Allilueva who he had married in 1919, died. At the time it was announced that she had died of a heart attack, but it was widely believed that she had shot herself. There have also been rumors that Stalin himself killed her, but the truth is still not known. In 1933 a party purge, or chistka, was announced. This was to be a bloodless affair involving a check on the performance of all party members and the expulsion of those whose per-


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formance was found to be deficient. This was followed by similar campaigns in 1935 and 1936. Against this background of suspicion of the true beliefs and commitment of some party members, the seventeenth congress of the party was held in January–February 1934. This congress, the so-called Congress of Victors, announced the successful completion of collectivization, and although there was a significant level of public glorification of Stalin, there was also evidence of some high-level dissatisfaction with him. In December of that year, Leningrad party boss and close associate of Stalin, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated. Kirov’s death was used as an excuse to crack down on various elements including so-called Trotskyites and Zinovievites. In January 1935, Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and seventeen other members of a reputed “center” were tried and convicted of moral and political responsibility for the death of Kirov, and were sentenced to imprisonment. This wave of purging tapered off by the middle of 1935. However, it surged once again in 1936, paradoxically at the time of the discussion of the new Stalin state Constitution adopted in December 1936, lasting unabated until the end of 1938. The so-called Great Terror, symbolized by the show trials of Old Bolsheviks in August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938, destroyed all semblance of opposition to Stalin and left him supreme at the apex of the party. He was now the unchallenged leader of the country, the vozhd, untrammelled by considerations of collective leadership, the absolute arbiter of the futures of all of those who worked with him in the leadership and in the country as a whole. The personal primacy of Stalin, symbolically celebrated in a new peak of adulation at the time of his sixtieth birthday, occurred at a time of increasing international tension. In August 1939 the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact was signed, an agreement that Stalin had actively sought. The results of that pact were played out in the following two years, with Soviet territorial gains on its western border. In May 1941 Stalin became chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, or prime minister, to add to his position as General secretary. The following month, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, ushering in a new phase in Stalin’s leadership, that of the war leader. From the time of the attack, Stalin was closely involved in organizing the defense of the Soviet Union. The long public delay in any announcement from him following the opening of hostilities led many to claim that Stalin, who had seemingly ig-


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Josef Stalin attends a meeting commemorating the completion of the first segment of the Moscow subway system in 1935. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

nored all warnings about the likelihood of German attack, had been mentally paralyzed by the attack and took no part in the initial Soviet response. However, it has now become clear that Stalin was busy in meetings during this time, participating as he did right through the war in the resolution of issues not just of civil government but of military strategy and tactics. Throughout the conflict, Stalin was closely involved in a practical capacity in directing the Soviet war effort. He was also important symbolically. By mobilizing Russian nationalism and presenting himself as its personification, Stalin became the ultimate symbol of both the Soviet populace and its armed forces. His refusal to leave

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Moscow, even when German troops were at its gates, reinforced this image. It is probable that the war ushered in the highest point of Stalin’s real, as opposed to cult-presented, popularity. Stalin became known as the Generalissimo. With the end of the war, the Soviet Union was clearly one of the leading powers remaining and Stalin was an international figure, as symbolized by his presence at the conferences with the British and U.S. leaders in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. He ruled over not only the Soviet Union, but also the newly established socialist states in Eastern Europe. At home, there was a return to orthodoxy as controls were tightened once again following the relaxation of the wartime period. Stalin’s personal control remained undiminished. The leadership functioned as Stalin demanded; formal party organs were largely replaced by loose groupings of individual leaders summoned at Stalin’s whim and carrying out whatever tasks he accorded to them. Always a suspicious man, Stalin’s sense of paranoia seems to have grown in the post-war period, something fueled by the Cold War. Although there were no purges on the scale of the 1930s, the more limited use of coercion and terror occurred in the Leningrad affair of 1949–1950, the Mingrelian case of 1951–1952, and the Doctors’ Plot of 1952–1953. As in the 1930s, such purging occurred against a backdrop of the apogee of the Stalin cult at the time of his seventieth birthday in 1949. In this period, Stalin was probably more detached from the daily process of political life than he had ever been. But this does not mean that he was any less powerful; he still set the tenor of political life, and he was in a position to be able to decide any issue he wished to decide, which is the true measure of a dictator. His colleagues, really subordinates, may have maneuvered among themselves for increased power and for particular policy positions, but none challenged his primacy. Stalin died on March 5, 1953, probably of natural causes; some have argued that some of his leadership colleagues may have poisoned him, but there has been no evidence to sustain this accusation.

through his father’s patronage quickly rose to a leadership position. He subsequently became an alcoholic. Yakov was in the army and was captured by the Germans; reports suggest that Stalin refused a prisoner swap that would have returned Yakov to him. After Stalin’s death, Svetlana married a citizen of India, and when he died in 1966 she took his body to India and decided to remain abroad, returning briefly in 1984. Stalin was the longest-serving leader of the Soviet Union and clearly left a major imprint on its development. He has been described as cruel, secretive, manipulative, opportunistic, doctrinaire, paranoid, devoid of human feelings and sentiment, single-minded, and power-hungry. All of these descriptions can find sustenance in different aspects of Stalin’s biography. Where the balance lies remains a matter of debate. What is clear is that when he believed it was required, he could be ruthless in the actions he took against both enemies and supposed friends. In this sense, he was a man of action. He was not an intellectual, despite the claims of the cult. His literary output was moderate in size and generally both turgid in prose and mechanical in its arguments, but it did gain the status of orthodoxy within the USSR, a function of his political dominance rather than the intrinsic merit of his work. Stalin’s life remains the subject of debate. Many aspects are still highly controversial, with scholars disagreeing widely on them. The following are among the most important of these.

Both of Stalin’s wives died at an early age, and he seems to have had difficult relations with his children. From his second marriage he had a son, Vasily (b. 1921) and a daughter Svetlana (b. 1926), both of whom outlived him. Stalin seems to have had little personal contact with either of these children or with Yakov, his son by his first marriage. Vasily joined the air force during the war and

Why was Stalin victorious? This question has often been posed in a broader form: Why did the Stalinist system emerge in the Soviet Union, the first attempt to create a socialist society on a national scale? Debate on this question has been vigorous precisely because of the implications its answer was seen to have for socialist aspirations more generally. Many, particularly on the right of the political spectrum, argued that such a system was a logical, even inevitable, result of revolution and the sort of system that Lenin set in place. Others argued that, while the Leninist system may have made a highly coercive, undemocratic system more likely, this was neither the necessary nor inevitable outcome of either the revolution or Leninism. Many argued the primacy of organizational factors, especially the power Stalin was able to gain and exercise within the party apparatus. Others emphasized the importance of Stalin’s personality, skills, and talents, especially in contrast to those of

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his opponents. Another strand of argument focused upon the regime’s desire to bring about substantial socioeconomic change in an economically and politically backward society, a situation requiring a high level of centralization and coercion. Others noted the role of the party’s isolation in Soviet society and the nature of the recruits flowing into its ranks. This question remains unresolved, but an answer, most now agree, involves elements of all of the arguments noted above. Was Stalin responsible for Kirov’s assassination? Those supporting the view that Stalin was responsible argue that Kirov was seen as a possible challenge to or replacement for Stalin, and accordingly Stalin had him assassinated. Other suggestions have been that Kirov’s killer was indeed working for a bloc of oppositionists as Stalin and his supporters claimed, that he was working alone, or that it was the security apparatus who had planned a failed assassination attempt to boost their institutional stocks but that this went wrong. Despite research in the archives, no definitive answer has been forthcoming, and all cases remain circumstantial. There is now no doubt about Stalin’s responsibility for the terror. This was not a normal party purge that went off the rails. Given Stalin’s position in the party organization and the position occupied by his supporters, this could not have gone ahead without his permission. He probably did not have an exact idea of how many people suffered during the terror, but he must have had an idea of the general dimensions, and he certainly knew of some of the individuals who perished, because he signed lists of victims submitted to him. Ultimately Stalin was responsible, even if the primary role in the direction of it lay with his henchmen. Was Stalin planning another major purge when he died? Those who argue in favor of this point to the buildup of pressure through the Leningrad affair, the Mingrelian case, and the Doctors’ Plot, and the enlargement of the party Presidium at the nineteenth congress of the party in October 1952. This was seen as preparatory to purging some of the older established leaders and bringing newer ones forward. Many of those who accept this logic also accept that Stalin was poisoned. There is no firm evidence about Stalin’s intentions either way, and unless compelling evidence comes from the archives, this will remain a moot point. Finally there is the question of the costs and benefits of Stalin and his regime. Under his rule,


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the Soviet Union moved from being a backward, predominantly agricultural country to one of the two superpowers on the globe. The living standards of many of its people rose significantly, as did literacy and education levels. Urbanization transformed the landscape. And the Soviet Union won the war against Hitler, something that would have been highly unlikely without high-level industrialization. But critics point to the costs: millions killed as a result of famine, terror, and collectivization; the massive wastage of resources; the establishment of an economic system that ultimately could not sustain itself; the development of a society which crushed individual initiative and free thinking. This was an ambiguous legacy, and one that therefore was difficult for the regime to handle. Under Khrushchev, destalinization was a limited policy that refused to come to grips with the reality of the Stalin regime. When discussion was again permitted, under Mikhail Gorbachev, the political circumstances of the time prevented a balanced evaluation from emerging. Russia still must broach this question, but it is likely that this will only happen in a satisfactory way when the Stalin issue is not seen to have contemporary political relevance. That may be some time off.

See also:

COLD WAR; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICUL-

TURE; CULT OF PERSONALITY; DE-STALINIZATION; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; KIROV, SERGEI MIRONOVICH; NAZI-SOVIET PACT OF 1939; PURGES, THE GREAT; SHOW TRIALS; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF; WORLD WAR II BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gill, Graeme. (1990). The Origins of the Stalinist Political System. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hingley, Ronald. (1974). Joseph Stalin: Man and Legend. New York: McGraw-Hill. Tucker, Robert C. (1973). Stalin as Revolutionary 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality. London: Chatto & Windus. Tucker, Robert C. (1990). Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–41. New York: Norton. Ulam, Adam B. (1989). Stalin: The Man and His Era. Boston: Beacon. Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1991): Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove. GRAEME GILL

STALIN REVOLUTION See

INDUSTRIALIZATION,

SOVIET.

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STANISLAVSKY, KONSTANTIN SERGEYEVICH (1863–1938), actor, director, acting teacher. The first creator of a comprehensive guide to actor training, Stanislavsky emerged as one of the most influential theater personalities of the twentieth century. His work continues to shape theatrical discourse into the twenty-first century. Born Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev to the wealthy Alexeyevs, he first performed in a fully equipped home theater outside Moscow. Because of his social class, he limited his theatrical ambitions to the amateur sphere. In 1888 he founded The Society of Art and Literature, a critically acclaimed theater club, where he established himself as an outstanding actor and emerging director. As his talents became known, he adopted “Stanislavsky” (1884) to protect his family name. In 1897 Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, playwright and head of the only acting school in Moscow, invited Stanislavsky to cofound The Moscow Art Theater (MAT) as a professional venture. The two agreed to produce plays of contemporary import, bring European stage realism to Russia, and ensure that the work of directors, designers, and actors would embrace unified dramatic visions. The theater opened with an historically researched production of Alexei Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich (1898). Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1898) secured the company’s fame. Stanislavsky directed and acted in productions such as premieres of Chekhov’s plays (1898–1904), Henrick Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1902), and Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902). In 1906 Stanislavsky lost inspiration as an actor and retreated to Finland in despair. The crisis induced his passionate desire to systematize acting. He devoted the rest of his life to collecting, developing, and teaching ways to control inspiration. His “System” went through continuous evolution incorporating the experience of great actors, behaviorist psychology, yoga, and other sources that illuminate the creative process. Stanislavsky’s experimental stance caused friction, which ignited in 1909 when he applied his ideas to Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. Nemirovich’s hostility prompted Stanislavsky to transfer his experiments into a series of studios, adjunct to the main company, even as he continued to act and direct at MAT. The First Studio, founded in 1911, became his most famous laboratory, because it laid the System’s foundation.

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With the Bolshevik revolution, Stanislavsky and MAT were reduced to poverty. From 1922 to 1924, Stanislavsky toured Europe and the United States with the company’s earliest and most famous productions in an effort to recoup financial stability. During this period, he also began to write, publishing My Life in Art in 1924. This period guaranteed his international influence. Upon returning to Moscow, Stanislavsky faced growing Soviet control over the arts. His connections with the West and his production of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play about White Russians, The Days of the Turbins (1926), came under attack. From 1934 to 1938, during the Soviet purges, Stanislavsky was weakened by an enlarged heart and confined to his home. Stalin simultaneously canonized the director’s realistic work as the vanguard of Socialist Realism. Isolated from the wider world, Stanislavsky continued to write, teach, and develop his ideas in his home until his death in 1938 of a heart attack.

See also:

BULGAKOV, MIKHAIL AFANASIEVICH; CHEKHOV,

ANTON PAVLOVICH; MOSCOW ART THEATER; SOCIALIST REALISM; THEATER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benedetti, Jean. (1990). Stanislavski: A Biography. New York: Routledge. Carnicke, Sharon Marie. (1998). Stanislavsky in Focus. London: Harwood/Routledge. Smeliansky, Anatoly. (1991). “The Last Decade: Stanislavsky and Stalinism.” Theatre 12(2):7–13. SHARON MARIE CARNICKE

STARCHESTVO See

SPIRITUAL ELDERS.

STAROVOITOVA, GALINA VASILIEVNA (1946–1998), martyred political figure and human rights activist. Galina Starovoitova was one of Russia’s leading human rights advocates and served in the first post-Soviet Russian government. Murdered by unknown assailants on November 20, 1998, in St. Petersburg, she was eulogized as “a symbol of courage and outspokenness,” “one of the brightest lights of Russian independence and reform move-


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ment,” and a leader with an “uncompromising dedication to democracy.” Starovoitova was born in Chelyabinsk, earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in social psychology, and in 1980 received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Ethnography, USSR Academy of Sciences. She worked as an ethnographer and psychologist, and published scientific works in both fields, with a specialization in inter-ethnic relations and cross-cultural studies. Her political activities began in the late 1980s with the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights organization led by Andrei Sakharov and other prominent dissident leaders. She joined with Sakharov to campaign for the rights of Armenians in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, and in 1989, in appreciation, was elected to the USSR Congress of Peoples’ Deputies from Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. The Congress elected her to serve in the Supreme Soviet, where she became one of the cofounders of the pro-reform Inter-Regional Group of Deputies. A year later, she was elected to the Russian parliament from a constituency in St. Petersburg and became a co-chair of the Democratic Russia Party. After the USSR collapsed, Starovoitova became an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin on interethnic affairs, but she resigned in 1992 because of disagreements over policy in the Caucasus region and frustration with a government still beholden to elements of the old Soviet system. From 1993 to 1994 she was a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., and the following year she taught at Brown University. In 1995 Starovoitova was elected to the Russian Duma, where she became a prominent spokeswoman on human rights, the war in Chechnya, the environment, women’s rights, wage issues, housing, antisemitism, and religious freedom. In 1996, she ran for the presidency, the first Russian woman to do so. She talked of running again in 2000, and before her death announced that she would run for governor of Leningrad oblast. Starovoitova saw Russia’s communists and nationalists as standing in the way of democratization, and they in turn were her main opponents. Shortly before her death, she spoke out forcefully about political corruption, and many speculate that her investigations in this area precipitated her murder. Millions of Russians mourned Galina Starovoitova’s death, and a kilometer-long line of people waited in the cold to pay their respects. The inves-


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Democratic activist Galina Starovoitova was murdered outside her apartment in St. Petersburg. © ANTONOV/RPG/CORBIS SYGMA

tigation of her murder was turned over to the highest authorities, but despite the interrogation of hundreds of witnesses, the detention of hundreds of suspects, and pledges to catch those guilty of the crime, no one was charged. Several Russians view the murder as a political assassination perpetrated either by organized crime or corrupt political officials.

See

also:

ORGANIZED

CRIME;

SAKHAROV,

ANDREI

DMITRIEVICH BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diuk, Nadia. (1999). “Galina Starovoitova.” Journal of Democracy 10:188–190. Powell, B. (1998). “Requiem for Reform.” Newsweek. December 7, 1998, p. 38. PAUL J. KUBICEK

START See

STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TALKS.

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Y E L E N A

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STASOVA, YELENA DMITRIEVNA (1873–1966), Bolshevik, secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, 1919–1920. Yelena Stasova belonged to a prominent St. Petersburg intelligentsia family. In the early 1900s she became a secretary of the illegal St. Petersburg committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. Stasova was an effective administrator and conspirator, as well as a staunch supporter of Vladimir Lenin. Arrested in 1907, she spent the next ten years in exile, first in the Caucasus and then in Siberia. After the revolution, in 1917 and 1918, Stasova was a secretary of the Petrograd party committee. She chose to concentrate on the mundane but crucially important work of administration, keeping records, dispersing funds, and handing out job assignments. In 1919, when Central Committee Secretary Yakov Sverdlov died, Lenin tapped Stasova to replace him. She struggled to improve the organization of the party’s central administration, but her efforts did not dispel charges of chronic inefficiency in the Secretariat. In 1920, Lenin responded by replacing Stasova with three male secretaries. She left the party leadership having played an important part in building the Communist Party’s apparatus. For the rest of her long life Stasova took insignificant assignments. In the 1930s she headed the International Organization for Aid to Revolutionaries. Her obscurity probably helped her survive the party purges and aid some of its victims. In the 1950s and 1960s she published several versions of her memoirs, all dedicated to restoring the reputation of the party’s founders. Stasova died of natural causes.

See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; FEMINISM BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Born into a prominent upper-class family (his father was a noted architect), Vladimir Stasov graduated in 1843 from the elite St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence and also studied piano. After a period in various undistinguished civil service jobs, he was appointed secretary to Prince Antaoly N. Demidov in 1851 and spent almost three years in the West, mostly in Florence. Back in Russia he found employment in the Imperial Public Library in the capital, and from 1872 until his death he headed its arts department. Stasov’s voluminous writings consist of polemical feuilletons, monographs on individual musicians and painters, and long overviews of developments in the arts (both in Russia and the West), as well as on Russian architecture and archeology. Inspired by the radical literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, Stasov promoted realist and national artistic forms that would engage the public in current social and historical issues. His original, liberal, and open-minded stance in opposition to the regnant academicism invigorated the cultural scene. But by the 1890s his aesthetics had turned conservative and chauvinistic, condemning as decadent the new artistic trends that were challenging national realism, which had by then become a new form of academicism. With the publication of his monograph on Mikhail Glinka in 1847, which stressed the composer’s originality in using folk motifs, Stasov began to advocate Russianness in music. Thereafter he consistently championed young, independent composers—Miliy A. Balakirev, Alexander P. Borodin, César A. Cui, Modest P. Musorgsky, and Nikolai A. Rimsky-Korsakov—whom he jointly called “The Mighty Five” (moguchaya kuchka). They all were self-taught, opposed the hidebound rules of the conservatory, and strove to create, in Glinka’s footsteps, a distinctly Russian school of music. Stasov supported these composers with polemical publications and contributed significantly to their creative work, suggesting topics, supplying historical documentation, and commenting on compositions. He was especially close to Musorgsky, whose genius he was the first to recognize.

(1824–1906), music and art critic whose aesthetics of realist and national expression in the arts served as a model for socialist realism.

In the 1860s Stasov began to comment regularly on the situation in the pictorial arts, questioning the authority of the Imperial Academy of Arts with its Italianate tastes. Instead, he advocated art that depicted Russian subjects in a manner that would instruct the public about the country’s realities. He became closely associated with young painters who in 1863 had quit the academy in protest against its outdated routines and in 1871

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founded the independent Association of Traveling Art Exhibits. Commonly known as the peredvizhniki (wanderers or itinerants), these artists painted Russian landscape, social genre, or historical scenes that were literally read by both Stasov and the public as critical commentary on current events. Stasov was very closely associated with Ilya Repin, the foremost painter of the school.

many, and big-government systems such as the United States that rely on Keynesian and other macromanagement methods, are often classified as state capitalist. Post-Soviet Russia, which describes itself as a mixed social economy, combining state and private ownership of the means of production with an autocratic state, can also be listed under this heading.

In the 1890s, as aestheticism began to supplant national realism, Stasov’s renown and influence waned. Prior to World War I and during the first decade of the Soviet regime, Stasov’s views were not respected, and were even derided, by the creative intelligentsia. His standing was restored by the Communist Party after the imposition of socialist realism as the guiding ideology for literature and the arts in 1932. But Stasov’s views were increasingly distorted to legitimate a narrow politicization of the arts and cultural isolationism that bore little resemblance to his original position in his creative period from 1860 to 1890. The pedestal on which Stasov stood as the preeminent art and music critic was toppled during the period of glasnost.

Even states dominated by administration and planning, with restricted markets such as the Soviet Union during the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP) 1921–1929, have been accused of being state capitalist by alleging that self-serving bureaucrats, or capitalist roaders had subverted and co-opted the state. Post-Maoist China provides a good example of how a socialist society governed by a Communist Party can serve the interests of property holders from the perspective of MarxistLeninism.

See also:

ACADEMY OF ARTS; MIGHTY HANDFUL; MUSIC;

OPERA; SOCIALIST REALISM BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curran, M. W. (1965). “Vladimir Stasov and the Development of Russian National Art, 1850–1906.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin. Olkhovsky, Vladimir. (1983). Stasov and Russian National Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Stasov, Vladimir Vasilievich. (1968). Selected Essays on Music, tr. Florence Jonas. New York: Praeger.

These distinctions are devoid of any rigorous economic content. They may serve some useful purpose for ideologues, but the classification reveals nothing about the productive potential, economic efficiency, or welfare characteristics of any particular state capitalist regime, or even whether the system relies primarily on markets or plans. The burden of the term is to place most economies outside the hallowed pale of Marxist socialism. Only North Korea and Cuba appear to be mostly directive regimes, with strong states and a socialist credo, in the twenty-first century.

See also: CAPITALISM; COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; MARKET SOCIALISM

ELIZABETH K. VALKENIER BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bettelheim, Charles. (1975). The Transition to Socialist Economy. Hassocks: Harvester Press.

STATE CAPITALISM The term state capitalism was coined by political economists to describe market economies heavily regulated or controlled by the state, on behalf of property owners. Unlike stateless capitalism, where markets function without governmental assistance, commonly called “free enterprise,” political authorities play a powerful role in state capitalist systems. The government is the agent of property holders, and functions as the executive committee of the capitalist class, even though it usually claims to rule in the interests of all the people. Social democratic regimes such as those of France and Ger-


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Buick, Adam, and Crump, John. (1986). State Capitalism: The Wages under New Management. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan. Cliff, Tony. (1974). State Capitalism in Russia. London: Pluto Press. Coleman, Kenneth M., and Nelson, Daniel N. (1984). State Capitalism, State Socialism and the Politicization of Workers. Pittsburgh: Russian and East European Studies Program, University of Pittsburgh. Crosser, Paul K. (1960). State Capitalism in the Economy of the United States. New York: Bookman Associates. Dunayevskaya, Raya. (1992). The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism: Selected Writings. Chicago: News and Letters.

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Gallik, Dmitri; Kostinsky, Barry; and Treml, Vladimir. (1983). Input-Output Structure of the Soviet Economy. Washington DC: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. James, Cyril Lionel Robert. (1969). State Capitalism and World Revolution. Detroit: Facing Reality. Raiklin, Ernest. (1989). After Gorbachev: A Mechanism for the Transformation of Totalitarian State Capitalism Into Authoritarian Mixed Capitalism. Washington, DC: Council for Social and Economic Studies. STEVEN ROSEFIELDE

STATE COMMITTEES The first state committees in the USSR, STO (Sovet truda i oborony, the Council of Labor and Defense) and Gosplan (State Planning Committee) were standing commissions of Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars). Their number grew during the 1930s, and the 1936 constitution granted Sovnarkom membership to the chairpersons of the All-Union Committee for the Arts (Komiskusstv or Vsesoyuzny komitet po delam iskusstv) and the All-Union Committee for Higher Education (Komvysshshkol or Vsesoyuzny komitet po delam vysshei shkoly). Chairpersons of other committees, such as the AllUnion Committee for Physical Culture and Sport (Komfizkult or Vsesoyuzny komitet po delam fizkultury i sporta), were not granted this status. During World War II, the State Defense Committee (GKO or Gosudarstvenny komitet oborony), chaired by Josef Stalin, was created as the extraordinary supreme state body to direct military and civilian resources and the economy, in order to achieve victory. This body was very significant during the war, and was the most powerful of all state committees during the USSR’s existence. In the 1950s and 1960s, with the increasing complexity of the economy of the USSR, and the increased importance of science and technology, the system of state committees developed rapidly as central interdepartmental agencies that coordinated and supervised the work of ministries and other state departments in their areas of responsibility. Although the state committees were formed theoretically by the Supreme Soviet, and their structure was approved by the Council of Ministers, the real decisions concerning their existence and structure lay with the Politburo. State committees were allocated administrative powers to organize, coordinate, and supervise the state departments with

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which they were concerned, their instructions having the force of law within the area of their jurisdiction. Like ministries, they could be either all-Union, with plenipotentiaries in the republics, or union-republic, functioning through parallel apparatuses in the republics. The State Committee of the USSR on Defence Technology (GKOT or Gosudarstvenny komitet SSSR po oboronu tekhnike) was created in 1957 but incorporated into a newly created Ministry of General Machine Building in 1965. The committee was responsible for all strategic ballistic missiles, spacecraft, and satellites developed in the USSR. By 1973 the following state committees existed: State Planning Committee (Gosplan or Gosudarstvenny planovy komitet). State Committee of the Council of Ministers of the USSR for Construction (Gosstroi or Gosudarstvenny komitet soveta ministrov SSR po delam stroitelstva). Formed in 1950 to secure increased efficiency in construction. State Committee on Labor and Wages (Gosudarstvenny komitet po voprosam truda i zarabotnoi platy). Formed in 1955 to oversee wages and working conditions. Committee for State Security (KGB or Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti.) Formed in 1954 when the police apparatus was reorganized. The much feared secret police acted with more autonomy than most other government bodies and with a large degree of independence from the Council of Ministers. State Committee on Foreign Economic Relations (Gosudarstvenny komitet po vneshnim ekonomicheskim svyazam). Formed in 1957 to develop economic cooperation with foreign countries and ensure the fulfilment of obligations. It was also responsible for overseeing organizations responsible for exporting equipment to socialist and developing countries. State Committee of the Council of Ministers of the USSR for the Supervision of Work Safety in Industry and for Mining Supervision (Gosgortekhnadzor or Gosudarstvenny komitet po nadzoru za bezopasnym vedeniem raboty promyshlennosti i gornomu nadzoru). Established in 1958. State Committee for Vocational and Technical Education (Gosudarstvenny komitet po professionalno-tekhnicheskomu obrazivaniyu). Formed in 1959 to implement and


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supervize policy for training skilled workers both in vocational and technical institutions and in the workplace, to develop a system of educational institutions in this area, and to watch over students in these institutions. State Committee for Science and Technology (Gosudarstvenny komitet po nauke i tekhnike). Formed in 1965 to coordinate policy to maximize the development and utilization of science and technology for economic purposes. State Committee for Material and Technical Supply (Gossnab or Gosudarstvenny komitet po materialno-tekhnicheskomu snabzheniyu). Formed in 1965 to supervise distribution to consumers, coordinate cooperation in delivery, and ensure fulfilment of plans for supply of output. State Price Committee (Gosudarstvenny komitet tsen). Formed in 1965 as a subcommittee of Gosplan, it became a full state committee in 1969. Its tasks included price regulation, pricing policy, and the use of prices to stimulate production. State Forestry Committee (Gosudarstvenny komitet lesnogo khozyaistva). Formed in 1966 to manage state forests and coordinate the activities of forest agencies. State Committee for Television and Radio (Gosudarstvenny komitet po televideniyu i radioveshchaniyu). Formed in 1970. State Committee on Standards (Gossstandart or Gosudarstvenny komitet standartov). Established in 1970 to encourage standardization and ensure standards in the quality of output. State Committee of the USSR Council of Ministers on Cinematography (Gosudarstvenny komitet po kinematografii). Created in 1972, its main task was to supervise the activities of film studios in the USSR. State Committee of the USSR Council of Ministers on Publishing, Printing, and the Book Trade (Gosudarstvenny komitet po pechati). Established in 1972 to supervise publishing and the content of literature in the USSR. State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries (Gosudarstvenny komitet po delam izobreteny i otkryty). Established in 1973. A law of 1978 granted membership in the Council of Ministers to all chairpersons of state committees.


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After the fall of the USSR, the RSFSR continued the use of state committees, forming the State Committee of the Russian Federation on Communications and Informatization (Goskomsvyaz or Gosudarstvenny Komitet Rossisskoi Federatsii po Svyazi i Informatizatsii) in 1997 from its Ministry of Communications. It was responsible for state management of communications and the development of many forms of telecommunications and postal services, including space communication in conjunction with the Federal Space Program of Russia.

See also:

CONSTITUTION OF 1936; GOSPLAN; POLITBURO;

SOVNARKOM; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Prokhorev, A. M., ed. (1975). Great Soviet Encyclopedia: A Translation of the Third Edition, vol. 7. New York: Macmillan. Unger, Aryeh. (1981). Constitutional Development in the USSR: A Guide to the Soviet Constitutions. London: Methuen. Watson, Derek. (1996). Molotov and Soviet Government: Sovnarkom, 1930–41. Basingstoke, UK: CREESMacmillan. DEREK WATSON

STATE COUNCIL The State Council was founded by Alexander I in 1810. It was the highest consultative institution of the Russian Empire. The tsar appointed its membership that consisted of ministers and other high dignitaries. While no legislative project could be presented to the tsar without its approval, it had no prerogatives to initiate legislation. Ministers sent bills to the State Council on the tsar’s command, reflecting the Council’s ultimate dependence on the tsar for its institutional standing and activity. Since the right of legislation belonged to the autocratic tsar, the State Council could only make recommendations on bills sent to it that the tsar could accept or reject. Additionally the State Council examined administrative disputes between the different governmental organs. After the Revolution of 1905 and the October Manifesto the State Council’s role changed: It became the upper house of Russia’s new parliamentary system. Every legislative bill needed the

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Council’s approval before becoming law. It also had the right to review internal policy of the Council of Ministers, the state’s budget, declarations of war and making of peace, and ministerial reports. Several departments under the State Council’s jurisdiction prepared briefs and more importantly analyzed legislation proposed by the Council of Ministers.

body “all the power and authority of the state are vested in it.” Its decisions and resolutions had the force of law. The initial membership was composed of Stalin as Chairman, Vyacheslav Molotov as Deputy Chairman, Kliment Voroshilov, Georgy Malenkov, and Lavrenti Beria. Stalin added Nikolai Voznesensky, Lazar Kaganovich, and Anastas Mikoyan in February, 1942.

The State Council, like all upper houses in Europe at the time, served as a check on the lower house, the Duma. The tsar appointed half of the Council’s members, while the other half were elected on a restricted franchise from the zemstvos, noble societies, and various other sections of the elite, making it by nature more conservative. In the period 1906–1914 the State Council, with the support of Nicholas II, played a large role in checking the authority and activities of the Duma, which led to general discontent with the post-1905 system.

The GKO met frequently, but informally, sometimes on short notice and often without a prepared agenda but acted on issues that were foremost on Stalin’s mind. Meetings always included people additional to the GKO, usually some Politburo members, members of the Central Committee, officers of the High Command, and various others with special knowledge requested to help address specific issues. The GKO did not develop its own administrative apparatus, but primarily implemented its decisions through the existing government bureaucracy, especially the Council of Peoples’ Commissars (Sovnarkom), the individual commissariats, and the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). Emulating Vladimir Lenin and his use of the Defense Council during the crisis years of the civil war, Stalin and the GKO often relied on plenipotentiaries endowed with broad powers to handle critical tasks. Decision-making bodies of the Communist Party and government were no longer asked for input and were seldom called upon to ratify the GKO’s decisions.

Following the failed coup of August 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev created a State Council consisting of himself and the leaders of the remaining Union Republics. Gorbachev hoped the State Council could craft a reconfigured USSR, but republic representatives increasingly failed to attend Council meetings. By the end of 1991, the State Council—and the USSR—had petered out. Russian President Vladimir Putin created his own State Council in 2000, consisting of the leaders of Russia’s eighty-nine administrative components.

See also:

ALEXANDER I; DUMA; FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF

1906; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Seton-Watson, Hugh. (1991). The Russian Empire 1801–1917. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yaney, George. (1973). The Systemization of Russian Government. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Each GKO member had specific areas of responsibility to supervise and obtain results. Molotov was to oversee tank production; Malenkov aircraft engine production and the forming of aviation regiments; Beria armaments, ammunition, and mortars, Voznesensky heavy and light metals, oil, and chemicals; Mikoyan supplying the Red Army with food, gasoline, pay, and artillery. Rather less specific was the requirement that each member of the GKO assist in inspecting fulfillment of decisions of Peoples’ Commissars in the course of their work.

With the intent of more effectively coordinating decision-making for the war effort, on June 30, 1941, Josef Stalin created the State Defense Council (also known as State Defense Committee or GKO). According to his speech in which he announced this

The chief strengths of the GKO were that it provided for quick decision-making on critical issues and speedily disseminated vital information to those at the top who needed to use it. The weaknesses of the GKO were that a few men were burdened with a multitude of tasks without a supporting administrative structure to distribute authority rationally and evenly, or to allow initiative. By relying on the existing Party and government structures, which had proven inefficient and prone to parochialism in defending their bureaucratic turf, the GKO was unable to capitalize fully on the unity at the top.

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Furthermore, the commissariats other government offices through which the GKO implemented its decisions had been evacuated to the interior of the USSR while the GKO remained in Moscow. The physical distance between the GKO and the commissariats hindered communication and efficient supervision. The government apparatus did not begin returning to the capital until 1943. With the end of the war, the GKO was formally dissolved on September 4,1945.

See also:

COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION;

STALIN, JOSEPH VISSARIONOVICH; WORLD WAR II BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barber, John, and Harrison, Mark. (1991). The Soviet Home Front 1941–1945. London: Longman. Werth, Alexander.(1964). Russia at War. New York: Carrol and Graf. ROGER R. REESE

STATE DEFENSE COUNCIL See

STATE DEFENSE

O R D E R S

countability, these provisions were designed to assure that enterprises produced what the public really wanted to buy. But, perhaps inevitably, the centralized supply organs would still have to check whether the correct volumes, assortments, and qualities of goods had been delivered on time to essential operations, such as the military-industrial complex. Ministries would retain some influence through norms and other indirect instruments, if not direct orders. Aside from some minor products, the State Standards Committee would still set minimum quality requirements. Moreover, party control of personnel and promotions remained untouched until the end of Soviet rule.

See also:

GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PERE-

STROIKA BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1998). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 6th ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Spechler, Martin C. (1989). “Gorbachev’s Economic Reforms: Early Assessments.” Problems of Communism 47(5):116–120.

COMMITTEE; WORLD WAR II.

MARTIN C. SPECHLER

STATE ENTERPRISE, LAW OF THE Of the many pieces of legislation passed during the period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Law of the State Enterprise (enacted 1987) was perhaps the most important. It represented yet another effort to separate long-term perspective planning from day-to-day operational control of enterprises. The latter function was to be the exclusive responsibility of the management, without the petty tutelage characteristic of the Soviet system. Enterprises could now enter into contracts (direct links), make quality improvements, and sell over-plan output without the approval of superior agencies. Local party organs would be banned from using enterprise personnel and materials for their own purposes. The centralized system of supply would control only the essential minimum necessary through orders (zakazy) from customers, rather than plan targets, as before. Accordingly, legal enforcement of contracts through arbitrazh (civil arbitration) courts and other legal institutions would be enhanced. A new agency was instituted, Gospriyemka (State Acceptance), independent of enterprise management along the military model, with the duty to check whether quality met state standards. Along with enhanced managerial ac-


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STATE ORDERS The introduction of state orders, as a part of perestroika, was an attempt to move from a total state control over the economy toward introduction of some market elements. During the mid-1980s, the Soviet communist leadership realized that the country was losing the economic competition to the West. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, introduced cautious policies designed to set up some market elements. One such change was the introduction of state orders. Prior to perestroika, state enterprises were supposed to produce goods according to the state plan and deliver them to the state for distribution. Gorbachev’s idea was to replace the state plan with state orders. Enterprises first had to produce and sell to the state production to fulfill their state orders. However, the state order should be for only part of their production. After enterprises fulfilled the state order—a guaranteed quantity of products that would be purchased by the state and production for which the state provided necessary resources—they

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could sell the remainder to customers at negotiated prices. The state order was supposed to constitute only a portion of a plant’s potential output. It was included in the state plan, and the resources for its implementation were supposed to be allocated by Gosplan. The percentage of state orders of total output was supposed to decline, giving way to a marketlike economy.

See also:

GOSPLAN; MARKET SOCIALISM; PERESTROIKA.

by Muscovite princes, dating the beginning of this process as early as possible, in the early fourteenth century (e.g., Cherepnin, 1960). Since the 1950s, well into the 1980s, it was much debated who had been allies and enemies of Muscovite centralization, but “centralization” itself was still perceived as an absolute good. In spite of its teleological and nationalistic implications, the state principle can be detected in post-Soviet Russian historiography as well.

See also:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure. Boston, MA: Addison Wesley.

HISTORIOGRAPHY; KIEVAN RUS; MUSCOVY;

SOLOVREV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH; TIME OF TROUBLES

MIKHAIL M. KROM PAUL R. GREGORY

STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF STATE PRINCIPLE State principle is the leading principle of writing and explaining Russian history in nineteenthcentury and, with some modifications, twentiethcentury national historiography. Professor Johann Philipp Georg Ewers (1781– 1830) was the first to apply to the study of ancient Russian law the Hegelian theory of peoples’ evolution from family or kin phase to that of a state. This idea was adopted and further elaborated by the founders of the so-called state (or juridical) school in Russian historiography, Konstantin Kavelin (1818–1885) and Sergei Soloviev (1820– 1879). According to Soloviev, the transition from kin relations as the dominant system to the strong state organization in Russia took about four hundred years, from the end of the twelfth century till the reign of Ivan IV. Only after that, having endured severe experience in the Time of Troubles, the young Russian state found its place among other European powers. Thus the whole course of Russian history was presented as a progressive and logically necessary movement toward the modern centralized and autocratic state. Though Soviet scholars, unlike Soloviev, considered Kievan Rus to be a feudal state, and thus found state organization even in the ninth century, they remained loyal to the state principle in their own way. Thus, disunity of the Rus lands in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries was regarded as a negative phenomenon, and historians explicitly sympathized with the process of gathering Rus’

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The political police and other organs of state security have played a prominent role in Russian and Soviet history. For almost two hundred years they have served a variety of state interests, including among their functions the surveillance of the population; censorship; the quashing of political and intellectual dissent; foreign and domestic espionage; and the guarding of borders. At times they have shared duties or been subsumed within the Ministry (or Commissariat) of Internal Affairs, and at other times they have been self-standing organs, often operating in parallel with the regular police or militia. Although the political police in the modern understanding of the term originated in Russia in the early nineteenth century, various forms of special security forces existed well before this. The first such organ to play a prominent role was Ivan IV’s (the Terrible) infamous oprichniki, who terrorized the Russian aristocracy in the late sixteenth century in order to root out Ivan’s real and imagined foes. In the mid-seventeenth century Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (r. 1645–1676) made use of a “Secret Department” (tainy prikaz) to keep him informed of events in the capital and to confirm the accounts of his foreign embassies. Crimes of “word and deed,” that is, either speech or action deemed inimical to the tsar, were vigorously investigated. Alexei’s successors continued to keep private security forces. Peter I (the Great) (r. 1682–1725) maintained the “Preobrazhensky Department” and later a “Secret Investigative Chancellery” staffed with


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close friends and trusted allies to maintain his personal power and to guard against insurrection. These institutions were preserved in various forms throughout the century, despite occasional gestures toward limiting their power; their agents became powerful instruments of the throne and were often feared and loathed among court circles. Despite reaffirming her ill-fated husband Peter III’s (r. 1761– 1762) abolition of the Secret Chancellery, Catherine II (the Great, r. 1762–1796) made much use of an agency called the “Secret Expedition” to root out opposition. Its leader, Stepan Sheshkovsky, was particularly noted for his brutal methods of interrogation, especially in the latter years of Catherine’s reign, when the French Revolution prompted an intensification of repression. These institutions (in general) had a narrower focus and scope than would the genuine political police that originated in the nineteenth century. This had its root not only in the ideals of the Enlightenment-era “well-ordered police state,” but also, ironically, in the French Revolution, which attempted to protect itself through institutions such as the Committee for Public Safety. Hence the organs of state security in Imperial Russia were concerned not only with the possibility of immediate rebellion within court circles, but with dissent in a more general sense. The early reforming efforts of Alexander I (r. 1801–1825) included the aspiration to establish a more rational government system. Of course this did not appear all at once, but it did involve the creation of a ministry system, including the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which soon acquired competence over all policing matters. In the latter years of Alexander’s reign, several different groups functioned as secret police forces, including the Secret Chancellery within the Ministry of the Interior. The true consolidation of a secret police force came early in the reign of Nicholas I (r. 1825– 1855). Nicholas’s accession had been met with a revolt of military officers known to history as the Decembrist uprising, and Nicholas became adamant that such an occurrence not repeat itself. As part of his efforts to strengthen his own autocratic powers vis-à-vis the ministerial system erected by his brother Alexander, he had formed a set of agencies under his own personal dominion, known collectively as His Majesty’s Own Chancery. The infamous “Third Section” of His Majesty’s Own Chancery formed the first modern secret police force in Russia. It was originally headed by General Alexander Benckendorff and included much of the


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staff of Alexander’s Secret Chancery. The Third Section vastly expanded the range of surveillance functions and incorporated other government officials in its scope, using army gendarme units to spy on the populace; the censors within the Ministry of Education to detect subversive writings; and the postal service to begin the practice of perlustration, or examining the contents of letters. Benckendorff also served as the head of the Corps of Gendarmes, an army unit that came to serve as the Third Section’s information-gathering apparatus. The power of Nicholas’s secret police grew during a time when political opposition in Russia was relatively muted. It concentrated therefore on rooting out intellectual dissidents. During the European Revolutions of 1848, the Gendarmes rounded up members of the so-called Petrashevsky circle, including the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was under Alexander II (r. 1855–1881), the Tsar-Liberator who at last emancipated the serfs, that revolutionary opposition began truly to appear. In the early 1860s, student riots broke out at St. Petersburg University, and in 1866 a demented ex-student attempted to assassinate the tsar. From this time the Third Section under Count Peter Shuvalov was given immense powers to eradicate subversives. It soon became involved in a number of high-profile prosecutions, including the notorious Nechayev Affair. Despite the judicial reforms of 1864, Shuvalov continued to use extralegal means whenever security and expediency required it. Through the 1870s, however, public sympathy increasingly rested with the defendants in a series of celebrated trials prosecuting revolutionary terrorists and other radicals. This culminated in the scandalous acquittal in 1878 of the man who had shot and wounded the muchloathed St. Petersburg police chief General Trepov. Political crimes were soon transferred to military courts to better control the outcome. In 1880, in an effort to better consolidate control, Alexander II transferred the responsibilities of the Third Section to a newly created Department of State Police within the Ministry of Interior, then headed by the moderate Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov. On March 1, 1881, Alexander II was assassinated by a conspiracy of the People’s Will terrorist organization led by Andrei Zhelyabov and Sofia Perovskaya. His son and successor, Alexander III (1881–1894), and his chief advisor Konstantin Pobednostsev demanded a firm accounting. The remnants of People’s Will and other terrorist groups of the late 1870s were ruthlessly sought out and expunged. Loris-Melikov was replaced by

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Nikolai Ignatiev, who soon promulgated a set of temporary measures providing for greater emergency policing powers. Establishing a system of quasi-martial law, these measures were renewed periodically until 1917, and they were used by the government when necessary to circumvent its own legal institutions. Henceforth the minister of the Interior would have broad powers to quell real and potential disturbances and dissent to maintain public order. Within the Interior Ministry’s Police Department was formed a new section in charge of political crimes, called the Division for the Protection of Order and Public Security, better known as the Okhrana. During the 1880s, political proceedings were much less publicized than they had been, and the authorities began to expand the practice of administrative exile of political prisoners—that is, deportation with no trial at all. The Okhrana expanded the business of state surveillance further than it had ever been before, using undercover agents to infiltrate revolutionary organizations. It also established a Foreign Agency to operate among emigré groups conspiring against the Russian government. From the assassination of Alexander II to the fall of the Romanov dynasty, the regime and its opponents were thus locked in a bitter struggle replete with murder and intrigue. Revolutionary terrorists, and in particular the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), carried out several spectacular assassinations, including several ministers of the interior—Dmitry Sipiagin in 1902 and the much-loathed Vyacheslav von Plehve in 1904. In response, the Okhrana increasingly used double agents to gather information on and control subversive groups, especially with the explosion of terrorist activity during and after the Revolution of 1905. The most infamous of the agent provocateurs was Evno Azev, who served the Okhrana while heading the SR’s Combat Organization, completely unbeknownst to his comrades, until his dramatic exposure by the rabble-rousing journalist Vladimir Burtsev. After 1908, there were increasingly fewer assassinations of top tsarist officials, with the major exception of the assassination of Prime Minister Peter Stolypin in 1911.

aries, and intellectuals. Many officials sympathized with the politics of right-wing organizations, which after all were bent on defending the monarchy, and the Okhrana became involved in the printing of anti-Semitic materials and condoned pogroms; but others were leery of permitting popular disorder. There was also disagreement over to what degree the police could circumvent the rule of law in its efforts to disrupt revolutionary activities. In the end, the tsarist organs of state security were unable to prevent the overthrow of the imperial regime, despite a marked increase in surveillance during World War I. The growing unpopularity of the tsar and his government was greatly exacerbated by the quixotic influence of Grigory Rasputin, whose rise to prominence concerned leaders of the Okhrana proved powerless to prevent. After the February Revolution in 1917, the Provisional Government abolished the Okhrana and Gendarmes and sponsored a series of hearings into the abuses of power that had occurred during the previous regime. The Council of People’s Commissars established the first Soviet organ of state security in December 1917, creating the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, better known by its Russian acronym as the Cheka. It was headed by the inimitable Felix Dzerzhinsky, recognized as the founder of the Soviet secret police. Under Dzerzhinsky’s leadership the Cheka, headquartered in the Lubyanka in central Moscow, quickly became a critical part of the Bolshevik efforts to stamp out all opposition in the difficult early days of power. Opponents of Soviet power were targeted starting soon after it was founded. The Red Terror began after the assassination of the Petrograd Cheka chief M. S. Uritsky and an unsuccessful attempt on Lenin’s life, both on August 30, 1918. Hundreds of real and imagined enemies were shot in an effort to quell all opposition, including Socialist Revolutionaries, landlords, capitalists, and other people associated with the old regime. Both the Bolsheviks and the various counterrevolutionary governments that formed during the civil war established intelligence services and made ample use of terror in attempting to win the struggle.

Despite the Okhrana’s successful efforts at infiltrating revolutionary groups and the awe and fear it inspired among the public, security officials faced several important obstacles. There was division over how to deal with the vigilante violence of radical nationalists, aimed at Jews, revolution-

At the end of the civil war, some voices from within the Bolshevik leadership began to press for the establishment of revolutionary legality and a reduction in the extralegal methods of the Cheka. With Vladimir Lenin’s support, the Cheka was abolished in February 1922 and replaced with the

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KGB bodyguards ride on a ZIL government car through the streets of Moscow. © TASS/SOVFOTO

State Political Administration, or GPU. The GPU was to be made nominally subordinate to the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, and subject to the laws of Soviet Russia. However, from the start this proved more illusion than reality. Dzerzhinsky remained both commissar of internal affairs and head of the GPU, and within a year and a half the GPU had reacquired most of its former powers and been removed from NKVD oversight (and renamed the OGPU). The transformation from Cheka to OGPU, from civil war extraordinary to ordinary organ, marked the institutionalization of the security police in the Soviet system. During the 1920s the OGPU competed with several other Soviet institutions for control of political policing operations. The system of administrative exile was reestablished along with a growing system of forced labor camps known as gulags. Political prisoners soon populated these destinations as they had under the old regime, and many individuals who had been exiled under the tsars found themselves once again in prison. In addition, the


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OGPU and the other organs of state security created a system of surveillance that would soon dwarf that of its tsarist predecessors. State censorship was unified in 1922 under a new organ, called Glavlit, which also worked closely with the secret police. At the same time, infiltration of Russian emigré groups and external espionage commenced. A dramatic intensification of secret police activity marked the end of the 1920s, when Josef Stalin solidified his hold on power. Dzerzhinsky and his successors as head of the OGPU, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and Genrikh Yagoda, allied themselves with Stalin and were instrumental in helping purge the opposition centering on Leon Trotsky. At the end of the decade, a series of show trials were orchestrated with OGPU support in which purported opponents of Soviet power were exposed and eliminated. This period ushered in the rapid intensification of Soviet industrialization campaigns and the collectivization of agriculture. It also featured the expansion of the system of administrative exile and prison camps, most notably through the campaign against the wealthier peasants, or kulaks, who were thought to

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be congenitally resistant to collectivization. The OGPU conducted a campaign of rooting out and deporting several hundred thousand kulaks and their families in the early 1930s in order to eliminate opposition to the collectivization of agriculture.

based on requests from the localities. The Gulags were expanded dramatically. The exact number of victims has been a measure of some dispute and is still being debated by scholars more than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union.

By 1931–1932 the OGPU had vastly expanded its extralegal authority and had gained primary competence over the rapidly growing penal apparatus. Its ability to control and observe the population was augmented through the introduction of an internal passport system in 1932. The 1930s and in particular the latter half of the decade are the period in which the punitive functions of the Soviet organs of state security reached their notorious zenith. Driven by a desire to purge the country of all real and imagined enemies, Stalin and his henchman in the secret police unleashed a wave of arrests, deportations, and executions, later known as the Great Terror.

The start of World War II exacerbated the felt need to remove potential fifth columns and intensified the deportation of ethnic groups, including Koreans, Poles, Germans, the Baltic peoples, Chechens, and Tatars. Yezhov had been removed and been replaced with the powerful Central Committee member Lavrenti Beria, marking yet another purge of leading NKVD cadres. Under the leadership of Beria and his equally notorious lieutenants, the organs of state security changed names several times, eventually reconstituting as the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB), which was renamed the Ministry of State Security (MGB) in 1946, functioning alongside and sharing some duties with the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).

In 1934 the OGPU was transformed once again into the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) within a reconstituted Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), under the leadership of Genrikh Yagoda. The first wave of purges focused on Stalin’s former colleagues in the Politburo who had been part of the several oppositions in the previous decade. The pretext for these purges was the December 1934 murder of the Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov, an event that, according to some historians, was actually ordered by Stalin himself. In any event, the increasingly militant atmosphere following Kirov’s death, in which accusations against loyal Leninists reached infamously absurd proportions, culminated in the show trials of 1936–1938. Such well-known old Bolsheviks as Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin were accused of plotting against the Soviet state and executed. Yagoda himself was caught up in the wave of purges; he was replaced as NKVD chief by Nikolai Yezhov in September 1936 and arrested along with a number of his colleagues the following year. Toward the end of the decade, the NKVD-led purges changed dramatically in tone and scope. Starting in 1935, mass deportations of particular ethnic groups deemed potentially unreliable had begun, and in 1937–1938 Stalin and Yezhov unleashed the most concentrated wave of the Terror. Hundreds of thousands of Party officials, former oppositionists, intellectuals, military officers, and ordinary citizens were arrested and imprisoned, deported, or summarily executed under Article 58 of the criminal code. Arrest numbers were approved a priori from the center but consistently increased

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In 1953, soon after Stalin’s death, the two ministries were fused, and a separate Committee for State Security (KGB) was established the following year. Beria was arrested by his anxious colleagues and executed toward the end of the year. Thus the three most notorious heads of the state security apparatus during the height of repression, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria, were all eventually removed by the system they had turned into an instrument of mass terror. The collective leadership that emerged took careful steps to reestablish Party control over the state security apparatus, and the security and regular police were now separate organs. The period of de-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev brought with it the gradual end of the terror and camp system that had characterized the Stalin period, and Khrushchev’s exposure of the excesses of Stalin’s rule changed the nature of the security organs. At the same time, the transition did not by any means diminish the authority of the KGB under the leadership of Ivan Serov, Alexander Shelepin, and their successors. While the abuses of the previous period were decried, and socialist legality once again stressed, the infiltration and surveillance of society by the security organs continued to intensify. In addition, the foreign counterespionage apparatus now reached a position of supreme importance in the tense atmosphere of the Cold War and the establishment of Soviet client states in Eastern Europe and around the world. That the KGB had emerged again as a powerful force in Kremlin politics is evidenced by the fact that Shelepin and his handpicked successor, Vladimir


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Semichastny, were instrumental in the coup that overthrew Khrushchev in October 1964. The KGB enjoyed increased prestige and a further expansion of extralegal powers under the Brezhnev-led collective leadership that followed. In conjunction with high Party leaders, the KGB began the well-known crackdown on internal dissidents in 1965 with the arrest of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel and the expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974. Under the leadership of Yuri Andropov, who chaired the KGB from 1967 until 1982, it became a stable and critical part of Brezhnev-era mature socialism. The reforms of the Gorbachev era, with their emphasis on openness and legality, threatened the central tenets of the security police, as did its loss of control over the Soviet satellite empire. The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the formal end of the KGB, which was replaced with several successor institutions within Russia, the most important of which came to be called the Federal Security Service (FSB). Nevertheless, despite the changed political circumstances in post-Soviet Russia, the FSB has maintained a great deal of authority, as is evidenced by the rise of former FSB chief Vladmir Putin to the presidency. While critics of the security police can now complain about its abuses, the legacy of centuries of powerful state security organs continues in the early twenty-first century.

See also: AUTOCRACY; OPRICHNINA; NICHOLAS I; PURGES, THE GREAT; RED TERROR; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; TERRORISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conquest, Robert. (1985). Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936–1939. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Daly, Jonathan. (1998). Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Dziak, John J. (1988). Chekisty: A History of the KGB. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Gerson, Lennard D. (1976). The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hingley, Ronald. (1970). The Russian Secret Police: Muscovite, Imperial, Russian and Soviet Political Security Operations, 1565–1970. New York: Simon and Schuster. Knight, Amy W. (1988). The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union. Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin. Leggett, George. (1981). The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for


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Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, December 1917 to February 1922. New York: Oxford University Press. Monas, Sidney. (1961). The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ruud, Charles A., and Stepanov, Sergei A. (1999). Fontanka 16: The Tsars’ Secret Police. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Squire, Peter S. (1968). The Third Department: The Establishment and Practices of the Political Police in the Russia of Nicholas I. New York: Cambridge University Press. Waller, J. Michael. (1994). Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Zuckerman, Frederic S. (1996). The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880–1917. New York: NYU Press. STUART FINKEL

STATE STATISTICAL COMMITTEE See GOSKOMSTAT.

STATUTE OF GRAND PRINCE VLADIMIR Allegedly authored by Grand Prince Vladimir (r. 980–1015), who is credited with the conversion of Kievan Rus to Christianity, the Statute established the principle of judicial separation between secular and clerical courts and forbade any of the Prince’s heirs from interfering in the church’s business. The Statute provided that all church personnel would be tried in church courts, no matter what the subject under litigation. The text scrupulously lists those who qualified for clerical jurisdiction, identifying not only monastics and members of church staffs, but also various social outsiders: pilgrims, manumitted slaves, and the blind and lame, for instance. In addition, the Statute granted church courts exclusive jurisdiction over certain offenses, even if secular subjects of the prince were involved. Divorce, fornication, adultery, rape, incest, disputes over inheritance, witchcraft, sorcery, charmmaking, church theft, and intrafamilial violence were among the subjects assigned to church courts. Over and above the income generated by church courts, the Statute assigned the church a tithe from all the Rus land and a portion of various fees that the Prince collected. Finally, the text authorized bishops to supervise the various weights and measures employed for trade.

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More than two hundred copies of the Statute survive, but none is older than the fourteenth century, a relatively late date for a document of such ostensible importance. In addition, the text includes some obvious errors that have helped undermine confidence in the legitimacy of the Statute. For instance, in the opening section the Statute reports that Grand Prince Vladimir accepted Christian baptism from Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who died almost a century before Vladimir converted to Christianity. The most recent study of the Statute, however, has concluded that, if not in Vladimir’s own time, then very soon thereafter, something like the Statute must already have existed. Archetypes of different parts of the Statute probably did originate in the reign of Vladimir, but the archetype of the entire Statute seems not to have arisen before the mid-twelfth century. This document, no longer extant, fathered two new versions in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and each of these, in turn, contributed to a host of local reworkings, especially during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As many as seven basic versions of the Statute survive, each evidently revised to correspond to local circumstances and changing times. No later than early in the fifteenth century, however, the Statute had come to enjoy official standing in the eyes of both churchmen and secular officials. In 1402 and again in 1419 Moscow Grand Prince Basil I (1389–1425) confirmed the judicial and financial guarantees laid out in the Statute. As a result, most extant copies survive along with other texts of secular and canon law in manuscript books like the Kormchaya kniga (the chief handbook of canon law) and miscellanies of canon law. Medieval secular codes, such as the Novgorod Judicial Charter and Pskov Judicial Charter, confirm that church courts in Rus did exercise independent authority, just as the Statute of Vladimir decreed.

See also:

KIEVAN RUS; NOVGOROD JUDICIAL CHARTER; PSKOV JUDICIAL CHARTER; STATUTE OF GRAND PRINCE YAROSLAV; VLADIMIR, ST.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shchapov, Yaroslav N. (1993). State and Church in Early Russia, Tenth–Thirteenth Centuries, tr. Vic Shneierson. New Rochelle, NY: A. D. Caratzas. DANIEL H. KAISER

STATUTE OF GRAND PRINCE YAROSLAV The Statute is reported to have come from the hand of Grand Prince Yaroslav (r. 1019–1054), son of Kievan Grand Prince Vladimir, who is credited with the conversion of Rus to Christianity and also with the authorship of the Statute of Grand Prince Vladimir, which instituted church courts in Kievan Rus. Inasmuch as no copy of Yaroslav’s Statute from before the fifteenth century survives, many historians doubted the authenticity of the document, but modern textological study has rehabilitated the Statute. Scholars now know of some one hundred copies of the Statute, which may be divided into six separate redactions that reflect changes in the document’s content as it developed in different parts of the Rus lands in the medieval and early modern period. The archetype of the Statute evidently did appear in Rus in the reign of Yaroslav, and gave birth to the two principal versions that dominated all later modifications in the text. The archetype of the Expanded version came into being in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, then spawned a host of specially adapted copies in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The Short version seems to have arisen early in the fourteenth century, also stimulating many further variations in the document’s content and organization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. No later than early in the fifteenth century the Statute came to enjoy official standing in the eyes of both churchmen and secular officials. In 1402 and again in 1419 Moscow Grand Prince Basil I (1389–1425) confirmed the judicial and financial guarantees laid out in the Statute. Most extant copies, consequently, survive along with other texts of secular and canon law in manuscript books such as the Kormchaya kniga (the chief handbook of canon law).

Kaiser, Daniel H., ed., tr. (1992). The Laws of Rus’: Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries. Salt Lake City, UT: Charles Schlacks, Jr.

According to the statute’s first article, Grand Prince Yaroslav, in consultation with Metropolitan Hilarion (1051–1054), used Greek Christian precedent and the example of the prince’s father to give church courts jurisdiction over divorce and to extend to the church a portion of fees collected by the

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Grand Prince. The various versions of the statute contained additional provisions, whose specifics depended upon the place and time that the version was created. Among other subjects, articles consider rape, illicit sexual intercourse, infanticide, bigamy, incest, bestiality, spousal desertion and other issues of family law and sexual behavior. The Statute also attempted to regulate Christian interaction with Muslims, Jews, and those who were faithful to indigenous religions. Finally, the Statute confirmed the precedent articulated in the Statute of Grand Prince Vladimir, according to which both monastic and church people would be subject exclusively to the authority of church courts. Later versions sometimes provided for punishment by secular authorities, but in the main version the Statute relied upon monetary fines to punish wrongdoers. No records of litigation that employed the Statute survive from Kievan Rus, but similar statutes that arose in Novgorod and Smolensk suggest that something like Yaroslav’s Statute existed in Kiev. In addition, secular codes such as the Novgorod Judicial Charter and Pskov Judicial Charter confirm that church courts in Rus did exercise jurisdiction independent of secular courts.

See also: BASIL I; KIEVAN RUS; STATUTE OF GRAND PRINCE VLADIMIR; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kaiser, Daniel H. (1980). The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kaiser, Daniel H., ed., tr. (1992). The Laws of Rus’: Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries. Salt Lake City, UT: Charles Schlacks, Jr. Shchapov, Yaroslav N. (1993). State and Church in Early Russia, Tenth–Thirteenth Centuries, tr. Vic Shneierson. New Rochelle, NY: A. D. Caratzas. DANIEL H. KAISER

(successively at Baranovichi, Mogilev, and Orel) of the Supreme Commander. A succession of incumbents, including Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, Tsar Nicholas II, and Generals Mikhail Alexeyev, Alexei Brusilov, and Lavr Kornilov, wielded broad powers over wartime fronts and adjacent areas. The scale, scope, and impact of modern wartime operations demonstrated the need for such a command instance to direct, organize, and coordinate strategic actions and support among lesser headquarters, functional areas, and supporting rear. However, for reasons ranging from failed leadership to inadequate infrastructure and poor communications, the organizational reality never completely fulfilled conceptual promise. Between 1914 and March 1918, when Vladimir Lenin abolished a toothless version of Stavka upon conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk agreement, the headquarters grew from five directorates and a chancery to fifteen directorates, three chanceries, and two committees. In 1917, before occupation by the Bolsheviks in December, Stavka also served as an important center of counterrevolutionary activity. During World War II, a Soviet version of Stavka again constituted the highest instance of militarystrategic direction, but with a mixed military-civilian composition. Known successively as the High Command, Supreme Command, and Supreme High Command, Stavka functioned under Josef Stalin’s immediate direction and in coordination with the Politburo and the State Defense Committee (GKO). Stavka’s role was to evaluate military-strategic situations, to adopt strategic and operational decisions, and to organize, coordinate, and support actions among field, naval, and partisan commands. The General Staff functioned as Stavka’s planning and executive agent, while all-powerful Stavka representatives, including Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky, frequently served as intermediaries between Moscow headquarters and major field command instances.

See also:

MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; WORLD

WAR I; WORLD WAR II

STAVKA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stavka was the headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Russian armed forces (SVG, 1914–1918), or of the Supreme High Command of the Soviet armed forces during World War II. During World War I, the Imperial Russian version of Stavka constituted both the highest instance of the tsarist field command and the location


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Jones, David R. (1989). “Imperial Russia’s Forces at War.” In Military Effectiveness, Vol.1: The First World War, eds. Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Shtemenko, S. M. (1973). The Soviet General Staff at War. 2 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers. BRUCE W. MENNING

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STEFAN YAVORSKY, METROPOLITAN (1658–1722), metropolitan of Ryazan and first head of the Holy Synod. Born to a poor noble family in Poland, Yavorsky and his family moved to Left-Bank Ukraine to live in a territory controlled by Orthodox Russia. After studying in the Petr Mohyla Academy in Kiev, Yavorsky temporarily converted to Byzantine-Rite Catholicism so he could continue his education in Catholic Poland. In 1687, he returned to Kiev and the Orthodox Church and became a monk. As a teacher in the Kiev Academy, Stefan’s eloquence attracted the favorable attention of Peter I, who made him metropolitan of Ryazan in 1700. After the death of Patriarch Adrian I in 1700, Peter made Stefan the locum tenens of the Patriarchal throne. Initially Stefan supported Peter’s reform program. But over time, Peter’s treatment of the Orthodox Church elicited Stefan’s criticism and brought a corresponding decline in his influence. Stefan quietly objected to the secularization of church property and new restrictions on monasticism. Tensions between Peter and Stefan were only exacerbated by Stefan’s zealous prosecution of the Moscow apothecary Dmitry Tveritinov, whose heresy trial lasted from 1713 to 1718. Influenced by Lutheran ideas, Tveritinov rejected icons and sacraments and claimed that the Bible alone provided sufficient guidance for salvation. The heresy trial naturally brought up unpleasant questions about Western Protestant influence in Peter’s reforms. Indeed, Stefan’s attack on Lutheranism, The Rock of Faith, completed in 1718, could not be published until 1728, after Peter’s death. To make matters worse, Stefan’s political reliability came in to question after Alexei, Peter’s son, fled abroad; in one of his sermons shortly before Alexei’s flight, Stefan called him “Russia’s only hope.”

embodied the contradictions of early eighteenthcentury Russia. One of several learned Ukrainian prelates who became prominent under Peter, Stefan both promoted Westernization and sought to limit it. He was deeply influenced by the thought of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and helped to introduce this theology into Russian Orthodoxy through his writings.

See also:

HOLY SYNOD; PETER I; PROKOPOVICH, FEOFAN;

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cracraft, James. (1971). The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. J. EUGENE CLAY

STENKA RAZIN (c. 1630–1671), leader of a Don Cossack revolt and hero of folksong and legend. Stepan Timofeyvich Razin, also known as Stenka Razin, is the hero of innumerable folksongs, legends and works of art. The most popular motif is his (legendary) sacrifice of his bride, a Persian princess, whom he throws into the Volga River for the sake of Cossack solidarity. Over the past three centuries, the name of Stepan Razin has been associated in the Russian popular mind with freedom, social justice, and heroic and adventurous manhood. The philosopher Nikolai A. Berdyaev, assessing the phenomenon of communism in Russia, characterized it as a synthesis of Marx and Stenka Razin.

A transitional figure between the patriarchal and the synodal periods of the Orthodox Church, Stefan

Stepan Razin, the son of a Don Cossack ataman (military leader) and, it is said, a captive Turkish woman, rose to prominence among the Cossacks at a relatively young age. Thus there was no shortage of volunteers when he led a series of brigandage expeditions to the lower Volga in 1667 and the Caspian Sea in 1668 and again in 1669, especially from among the many impoverished newcomers to the Don region, mostly former peasants escaping serfdom. Unlike other Cossack leaders, Razin welcomed the newcomers and cultivated the spirit of Cossack brotherhood and equality (obsolete by his time) among his men. His expeditions were unusually successful—Russian and Persian caravans were plundered, Persian commercial settlements and towns were devastated, a Persian fleet was defeated, and Razin’s warriors won riches and glory.

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In the meantime, Peter’s new favorite, Feofan Prokopovich, authored the Spiritual Regulation, a radical church reform that replaced the office of Patriarch at the head of the Orthodox Church with a Holy Synod—a council of bishops and priests. In a vain attempt to halt the rise of his rival, Stefan accused Feofan of heresy, but was forced to withdraw the charge and apologize. In 1721 Peter nevertheless appointed Stefan to become the first presiding member of the new Holy Synod. He died a year later.

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Upon returning to Russia, Razin departed from tradition by keeping his band intact and not sharing his booty with the established Cossack leaders. Moreover, as he passed through the lower Volga cities of Astrakhan and Tsaritsyn, hundreds of townsmen, fugitive peasants, and even regular soldiers flocked to his standard. The commanders of the Russian garrisons did not dare to stop the popular hero and let him and his men return to the Don region unimpeded. Having raised an army of perhaps seven to ten thousand, Razin announced a new campaign in 1670, aimed at settling scores with the tsar’s boyars and officials, the “traitors and oppressors of the poor.” The towns of Saratov and Samara opened their gates to him; Russian peasants and indigenous peoples rose up in revolt by the tens of thousands throughout the lower and middle Volga region. The rebels intended to march on Moscow, although they maintained that they were loyal to the tsar. They were defeated, however, when they besieged the next large town, Simbirsk, crushed by the government’s regular army, which exploited the lack of coordination between Cossacks and peasants. Stenka Razin fled to the Don region, where in 1671 he was captured by the men of his godfather, Kornilo Yakovlev, a leader of the Don Cossacks. Stenka Razin and his younger brother Frol were delivered to Moscow in an iron cage and executed on June 6, 1671.

See also:

COSSACKS; FOLKLORE; PEASANTRY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Field, Cecil. (1947). The Great Cossack: The Rebellion of Stenka Razin against Alexis Michaelovitch, Tsar of All the Russias. London: H. Jenkins. Fuhrmann, Joseph T. (1981). Tsar Alexis: His Reign and His Russia. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

S E R G E I

V A D I M O V I C H

Sergei Stepashin joined the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union and served there until 1990. He graduated from the Military Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In his last years in the Ministry of Internal Affairs he was involved in the Ministry’s response to such “hot spots” as Baku, the Fergana Valley, NagornoKarabakh, and Sukhumi. In 1990 he was elected to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet from Leningrad, and he served as chairman of the Committee on Defense and Security. He served in the Russian parliament until 1993. A political ally of President Boris Yeltsin, Stepashin was also appointed deputy minister of security in 1991 and held that post until 1993. In 1993 Stepashin supported Yeltsin in his struggle with the Russian parliament; Yeltsin appointed him deputy minister, then, in March 1994, minister, of the Counter-Intelligence Service. Stepashin played a leading role in unsuccessful covert efforts to overthrow the Dudayev government in Chechnya in the fall of 1994. In 1995 Yeltsin officially fired Stepashin for the fiasco in handling the Chechen raid on Budennovsk in Russia but continued his involvement in counter-intelligence activities. In 1997 Yeltsin appointed him minister of Justice. In the administrative turnover of the last years of Yeltsin’s second term, Stepashin moved up rapidly. He was appointed minister of Internal Affairs in April 1998 and then prime Minister in May 1999 to replace Yevgeny Primakov. Stepashin directed the government’s initial response to the raid of Chechen bands into Dagestan, but was replaced as prime minister by Vladimir Putin in September 1999. In 2000 Putin appointed Stepashin to head the State Auditing Commission.

See also:

CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS; MILITARY, SOVIET

AND POST-SOVIET; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; YABLOKO; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

ELENA PAVLOVA BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bohlen, Celestine. (1999). “Yeltsin Dismisses Another Premier: KGB Veteran Is In.” The New York Times (August 10, 1999).

STEPASHIN, SERGEI VADIMOVICH (b. 1952), general-lieutenant of the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, member of Supreme Soviet and chair of the Defense and Security Committee, head of the Counter-Intelligence Service, minister of Internal Affairs, prime minister, and head of State Audit Commission.


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Bohlen, Celestine. (2002). “Sergey Vadimovich Stepashin.” National Politics. . Shevtsova, Lilia. (1999). Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. JACOB W. KIPP

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STEPENNAIA KNIGA See

BOOK OF DEGREES.

STEPPE To the forest-dwelling, inland-looking Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarus), the steppes of Central Russia and Eurasia historically were much like the oceans and seas to maritime civilizations. In song and verse, these vast grasslands were the dikiye polya (wild fields) inhabited by the equivalent of untamed, bloodthirsty pirates. Between 700 B.C.E. and 1600 C.E., the steppes were the realm of marauding horse-riding nomads, scions of the Völkerwanderungen (peoples’ migrations), such as the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Polovtsy, Mongol-Tatars, and multi-cultural free-booting Cossacks. Indeed, until the invention of the steel-tipped, moldboard plow in the nineteenth century, Eastern Slavic farmers were unable to cultivate the rich black-earths (chernozems) of the steppes, and they confined their settlements mainly to the forest zones. Steppe climates are sub-humid, semiarid continental types. Summer lasts from four to six months. Average July temperatures range from 70 to 73.5 degrees Fahrenheit (21 to 23 degrees Celsius). Winter, by Russian standards, is mild, with January averaging between -4 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit (-13 and 0 degrees Celsius). It generally persists for three to five months. There is a distinctive lack of soil moisture. Average annual precipitation is 18 inches (46 centimeters) in the north and 10 inches (26 centimeters) in the south. Most of it derives from summer thunderstorms. The depth of snow cover in winter ranges from 4 inches (10 centimeters) in the south to 20 inches (50 centimeters) in the north. Steppe ecology exhibits subtle diversity. Herbaceous vegetation abounds. The only natural forests follow the river valleys and ravines, but shelterbelts, planted since the 1930s, parallel the roads and farms to trap snow in winter. Salinized soils (solonets) occasionally interrupt the predominant chernozems and chestnut soils. Small mammals typify the steppe, including marmots, hamsters, social meadow mice, jerboas, and others.

sia’s Altay Foreland and in northern Kazakhstan (the “Virgin Lands”); thus most of the natural steppe is gone. Common crops are wheat, barley, sunflowers, and maize.

See also:

CLIMATE; GEOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, James S. (1968). Russian Land, Soviet People. New York: Pegasus. Jackson, W. A. Douglas. (1956). “The Virgin and Idle Lands of Western Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan.” The Geographical Review 46:1–19. Shaw, Denis J. B. (1999). Russia in the Modern World: A New Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell. VICTOR L. MOTE

STILIAGI A Soviet youth subculture that emerged in the late 1940s and extended into the early 1960s. The term stiliagi first appeared in the Soviet press in 1949 to provide a negative characterization of young men who pursued what they believed to be Western models of behavior, leisure, clothing, and dance styles. Stil’ (style) was essential for them and the very first stiliagi—almost exclusively men—sported elaborate haircuts and colorful suits and ties. In the early 1950s the stiliagi clothing style became more subdued as they adopted a more “American” look and wore narrow black pants and thick-soled shoes. The stiliagi, displaying a pronounced American orientation, called themselves shtatniki (United States-niks). They listened to American jazz, smoked American cigarettes, and used American slang. In the late 1950s and early 1960s some stiliagi embraced rock culture as it began to spread in the West. Nightlife was important for the stiliagi and they regularly gathered in public and private spaces to listen to jazz and dance Western dances.

This zone and the wooded-steppe to the north yield Russia’s best farmland. Between 1928 and 1940, most of the steppe was converted to state and collective farms. In the 1950s, long-term fallow lands (perelog and zalezh) were plowed in Rus-

The stiliagi phenomenon is most strongly associated with the ideological relaxation and the growing material well-being in the post-Stalin period. The predominant majority of the stiliagi were students of higher educational institutions in major urban centers. They came from families of the Soviet professional, political, and managerial elite, also known as the nomenklatura. Under Stalin and later Soviet leaders, the nomenklatura received a

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number of privileges (e.g., access to special stores, trips abroad, better housing, financial bonuses) in exchange for political conformity. The stiliagi phenomenon reflected the growing consumerist and leisure-oriented mentality of the upper crust of Soviet society. The stiliagi culture was widely denounced by the Soviet media. The official Komsomol campaign targeted their “parasitic” and immoral attitude toward work, lack of political involvement and loyalty, and pro-Western spirit. In individual cases, the stiliagi were forced to change their dress and hairstyles and were expelled from the Komsomol. In the mid-1980s, parallel to glasnost and perestroika, there was a revival of the stiliagi culture. The new stiliagi included girls and adopted a dress code of black suits, white shirts, and narrow ties. They were fans of the Soviet rock ‘n’ roll bands “Brigada S” and “Bravo.” This new generation of stiliagi was part of the growing number of neformaly (non-formal), youth groups that emerged outside of the official youth culture controlled by the Komsomol and reflected the growing crisis of cultural and political identity among Soviet youth.

See also:

NOMENKLATURA

Trade at the Moscow Stock Exchange, August 29, 1998.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edele, Mark. (2002). “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945–1953.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 50(1):37–61. Kassof, Allen. (1965). The Soviet Youth Program: Regimentation and Rebellion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pilkington, Hilary. (1994). Russia’s Youth and Its Culture. A Nation’s Constructors and Constructed. New York: Routledge. LARISSA RUDOVA

STOCK EXCHANGES Stock market exchanges are a real or virtual location for the sale and purchase of private equities. A way for private enterprises to raise investment funds. The first stock market exchange in post-Soviet Russia was primarily trade in privatization vouchers. As privatization proceeded apace, so did the volume of transactions on Russian exchanges. Shares


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© R.P.G./CORBIS SYGMA

in certain Russian enterprises, particularly those of oil and gas companies, were also increasingly offered on the market, but the stock market or markets in Russia have yet to offer enterprises significant sources of either domestic or foreign investment funds. Initially, the Russian stock exchanges were wild and risky places to venture funds. The early days witnessed two major boom and bust cycles: 1994–96 and 1996–98. Following the financial crisis of 1989, the Russian stock market almost ceased to exist. The Russian government sought to regulate the market step by step. Prior to 1996 enterprises were not required by law to maintain independent, public registries of stock outstanding, and both domestic and foreign investors learned to their dismay that they could be defrauded of their equity claims. The 1996 Russian Federal Securities Act required public registries and created the Federal Securities Commission and charged it with coordinating the various federal agencies that were

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responsible for governing the securities market. Conditions have improved for investors, but much remains to be done to create a reasonable market in equities comparable with those in more advanced capitalist countries. It remains more a site for speculation than for raising significant amounts of investment funds.

See also:

ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley. Gustavson, Thane. (1999). Capitalism Russian-Style. New York: Cambridge University Press.

government promoted Lutheran missionary activity among the Orthodox inhabitants and encouraged settlement from other Swedish dominions. The Stolbovo settlement was reconfirmed by the 1661 Treaty of Kardis, but overturned by the Treaty of Nystad (1721) that ended the Great Northern War. Sir John Merrick, an English merchant, helped to negotiate the treaty, testifying to Russia’s growing links with Western Europe. The treaty is also connected with a famous relic, the Tikhvin Icon of the Mother of God, a copy of which was brought to Stolbovo for the negotiations.

See also:

NOVGOROD THE GREAT; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL

FYODOROVICH; SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH; SMOLENOK WAR; SWEDEN, RELATIONS WITH; TIME OF

JAMES R. MILLAR

TROUBLES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

STOLBOVO, TREATY OF Signed February 27, 1617 in Stolbovo village, this treaty terminated Swedish intervention in Russian affairs after the Time of Troubles. King Gustavus Adolphus recognized Mikhail Romanov as the legitimate tsar of Russia; withdrew the claim of his brother Charles Philip to the Russian throne; and evacuated Novgorod. Russia ceded eastern Karelia and Ingria to Sweden, foregoing direct access to the Baltic Sea, and paid an indemnity of twenty thousand rubles. King Charles IX had initially intervened in 1609 to provide aid against Polish attempts to place a pretender on the Russian throne. Following the deposition of Vasily Shuisky in 1610, the boyars’ council agreed to accept Prince Wladyslaw, son of King Sigismund III, as the next tsar of Russia. Sweden declared war and advanced the candidacy of Charles Philip to the vacant throne. Novgorod was seized in July 1611. Sweden found it difficult to control northwestern Russia effectively, and its occupation drained away military resources needed to protect Swedish interests in Central Europe. The Stolbovo terms met Sweden’s primary objective, ensuring that the Baltic coast—and with it, the primary east-west trade routes remained in Swedish hands.

Küng, Enn. (2001). “The Swedish Economic Policy in the Commercial Aspect in Narva in the Second Half of the 17th Century.” Ph.D. diss. Tartu University, Estonia. NIKOLAS GVOSDEV

STOLNIK The highest general sub-Duma rank of military and court servitors in Muscovy. Literally meaning “table-attendant,” stolnik first appears in 1228 and 1230 for episcopal and princely court officials. As Moscow grew, younger and junior memoirs of the top families and provincial serving elites needed a place at court. Accordingly stolnik lost its earlier meaning and was granted to many members of these strata. Above it was the much smaller number of postelniks (chamberlains), and below a large contingent of striapchis (attendants, servants—a term that appears by 1534), and Moscow dvorianins. The service land reforms of the 1550s and 1590s assigned Moscow province estates to these ranks.

Stolbovo marks the high point of Sweden’s eastward expansion beyond the border first confirmed by the 1323 Treaty of Nöteborg. The Swedish

From the end of the sixteenth century to 1626, the numbers of stolniks, striapichis, and Moscow dvorianins grew respectively from 31–14–174 to 217-82-760, plus another 176 stolniks of Patriarch Filaret, much of that growth occurring during the Time of Troubles. After measured growth to 1671, the numbers of stolniks mushroomed from 443 to

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1307 in 1682 and 3233 in 1686. By this time an elite category of chamber stolniks arose, growing from 18 in 1664 to 173 in 1695. Some stolnik were always in the tsar’s suite, attending to his needs. In 1638, the average stolnik land-holding was seventy-eight peasant households, sufficient to outfit an elite military servitor and several attendants, as opposed to 24 and 28–29 respectively for the average striapchiu and Moscow dvorianin, and 520 for the average Duma rank. The most eminent family names virtually filled the stolnik rosters in the early seventeenth century. Among those on the 1610–1611 list were Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, the military hero of 1612 and the young “Mikhailo” Romanov, elected tsar in 1613. The percentage of non-aristocratic stolniks surpassed two-thirds toward the end of the century. Under Peter I (the Great) these terms disappeared, but former stolniks and their progeny constituted the critical mass of the upper ranks of his service-nobility.

See also:

P E T E R

A R K A D I E V I C H

Jewish, German, and other communities rendered privileged Russians a distinct minority. Stolypin’s nationalism, a hallmark of his later political career, cannot be understood apart from this early experience of imperial Russian life. As did an increasing number of his noble contemporaries, Stolypin attended university, entering St. Petersburg University in 1881. Unlike many noble sons intent on the civil service and thus the study of jurisprudence, Stolypin enrolled in the physics and mathematics faculty, where among the natural sciences the study of agronomy provided some grounding for a lifelong interest in agriculture. Married while still a university student to Olga Borisovna Neidgardt (together the couple would parent six children), the young Stolypin obtained a first civil service position in 1883, a rank at the imperial court in 1888, but a year later took the unusual step of accepting an appointment as a district marshal of the nobility near his family estate in Kovno. He spent much of the next fifteen years immersed in provincial public life and politics.

BOYAR; DUMA; MUSCOVY; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL

FYODOROVICH; TIME OF TROUBLES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DAVID M. GOLDFRANK

STOLYPIN, PETER ARKADIEVICH (1862–1911), reformist, chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1906–1911. Peter Arkadievich Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1906–1911, attempted the last, and arguably most significant, program to reform the politics, economy, and culture of the Russian Empire before the 1917 Revolution. Stolypin was born into a Russian hereditary noble family whose pedigree dated to the seventeenth century. His father was an adjutant to Tsar Alexander II, and his mother was a niece of Alexander Gorchakov, the influential foreign minister of that era. Spending much of his boyhood and adolescence on a family estate in the northwestern province of Kovno, Stolypin came of age in an ethnically and religiously diverse region where Lithuanian, Polish,


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Peter Stolypin introduced key agrarian reforms under Nicholas II. © HULTON ARCHIVE

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Scholars generally agree that these years shaped an understanding of imperial Russia, and the task of reform that dominated his later political career. Of primary importance was his experience of rural life. For much of the 1890s the young district marshal of the nobility also led the life of a provincial landowning gentleman. Residing on his family estate, Kolnoberzhe, Stolypin took an active interest in farming, managing income earned from lands both inherited and purchased. He also experienced the variety of peasant agriculture, perhaps most notably the smallholding hereditary tenure in which peasant families of nearby East Prussia often held arable land. Stolypin’s understanding of autocratic politics also took shape in the provinces. There he first encountered its peculiar amalgam of deference, corruption, bureaucracy, and law. In 1899 an imperial appointment as provincial marshal of nobility in Kovno made him its most highly ranked hereditary nobleman. Within three years, in 1902, the patronage of Viacheslav von Pleve, the Minister of Internal Affairs, won him appointment as governor of neighboring Grodno province. Early 1903 brought a transfer to the governorship of Saratov, a major agricultural and industrial province astride the lower reaches of the Volga river valley. An incubator of radical, liberal, and monarchist ideologies, and the scene of urban and rural discontent in 1904–1905, Saratov honed Stolypin’s political instincts and established his national reputation as an administrator willing to use force to preserve law and order. This brought him to the attention of Nicholas II, and figured in his appointment as Minister of Internal Affairs, on the eve of the opening of the First State Duma in April 1906. When the tsar dissolved the assembly that July and ordered new elections, he also appointed Stolypin to chair the Council of Ministers, a position that made him the de facto prime minister of the Russian Empire.

gence of the law to dominate political opponents and assert the preeminence of a superficially reformed monarchy. Hence, in August 1906, he established military field court-martials to suppress domestic disorder. More drastically, he undertook the so-called coup d’état of June 3, 1907, dissolving what was deemed an excessively radical Second State Duma and, in clear violation of the law, issuing a new electoral statute designed to reduce the representation of peasants, ethnic minorities, and leftist political parties. A second view, shared by a minority of his contemporaries but a majority of historians, accepted that Stolypin never entirely could have escaped the authoritarian impulses widespread in tsarist culture and especially pronounced among those upon whom Stolypin’s own influence most depended— moderate public opinion; the hereditary nobility, the imperial court; and ultimately the tsar, Nicholas II. Given such circumstances, without order the far-reaching “renovation” (obnovlenie) of the economic, cultural, and political institutions of the Empire envisioned by Stolypin would have been politically impossible. Of central importance to this interpretation was the Stolypin land reform, first issued by administrative decree in 1906 and approved by the State Duma in 1911. This major legislative accomplishment aimed to transform what was deemed to be an economically unproductive, politically destabilizing peasant repartitional land commune (obshchina) and eventually replace it with family based hereditary smallholdings. Yet, the reform initiatives of these years were not limited only to this “wager on the strong,” but extended into every important arena of national life: local, rural, and urban government; insurance for industrial workers; religious toleration; the income tax; universal primary education; university autonomy; and the conduct of foreign policy.

His tenure from 1906 through 1911 was tumultuous. Typically, historians have assessed it in terms of a balance between the conflicting imperatives of order and reform. Ironically enough, contemporary opponents of Stolypin’s policies, most notably moderate liberals and social democrats who pilloried Stolypin for sacrificing the possibilities of constitutional monarchy and democratic reform to preserve social order, offered opinions of his politics that found their way, however circuitously, into Soviet-era historiography. In this view, Stolypin favored punitive force, police power, clandestine financing of the press, and a general negli-

In September 1911, Stolypin’s career was cut short when Dmitry Bogrov assassinated him in Kiev. Once a secret police informant, Bogrov’s background spawned persistent rumors of right-wing complicity in the murder of Russia’s last great reformer, but by all authoritative accounts the assassin acted alone. Some scholars argue that Stolypin’s political influence, and especially his personal relationship with Nicholas II, was waning well before his death, in large measure as a result of the western zemstvo crisis of March 1911. Yet, Abraham Ascher, Stolypin’s most authoritative biographer, credits the claims of Alexander Zenkovsky that Stoylpin was contemplating further substan-

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tive reforms of the empire’s administrative and territorial structures in the last months of his life. Stolypin’s historical reputation continues to be the subject of scholarly debate, the character and consequences of his policies intertwined with larger debates about the stability and longevity of the tsarist regime.

See also: AGRARIAN REFORMS; DUMA; ECONOMY, TSARIST; NICHOLAS II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ascher, Abraham. (2001). P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Conroy, Mary Schaeffer. (1976). Peter Arkad’evich Stolypin: Practical Politics in Late Imperial Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Macey, David A. J. (1987). Government and Peasant in Russia, 1881–1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Von Bock, Maria Petrovna. (1970). Reminiscences of My Father Peter A. Stolypin, tr. and ed. Margaret Patoski. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Waldron, Peter. (1998). Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia. London: UCL. Wcislo, Francis W. (1990). Reforming Rural Russia. State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855–1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zenkovsky, Alexander. (1986). Stolypin: Russia’s Last Great Reformer, tr. Margaret Patoski. Princeton, NJ: Kingston Press. FRANCIS W. WCISLO

ST. PETERSBURG From 1712 until 1918, St. Petersburg was the capital of the Russian Empire. Peter I (the Great) began the construction of the city as his “Window on the West” in 1703. During the subsequent three centuries, St. Petersburg was identified with the three major forces shaping Russian history: Westernization, industrialization, and revolution. The city was renamed Petrograd in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, because it sounded less German, was then named Leningrad after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, and again became St. Petersburg in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Confusingly, the surrounding region (oblast) is still known as Leningrad.


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In the early twenty-first century, with a metropolitan population of 4.8 million people, St. Petersburg is the second-largest city in Russia and the fourth-largest in Europe (behind Moscow, London, and Berlin). It is also Russia’s second-most important industrial center, having benefited from Soviet investment in heavy industry, research and development, military-industrial production, and military basing and training. The city is a major international port and tourist destination, with tourists flocking there in May and June for the legendary “White Nights,” during which the sun seems to never set.

CAPITAL OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Peter the Great seized control over the confluence of the Neva River and the Gulf of Finland from Sweden in 1703. Inspired by a visit to Amsterdam, he decided to build a major city on this barren marshland to better integrate Russia into Western Europe and secure a Baltic port. Thousands of peasants and prisoners-of-war were pressed into service to build the city’s numerous canals and palaces. When the harsh climate combined with malaria to kill tens of thousands of them, their bodies were dumped into the construction sites, leading to St. Petersburg’s nickname as the “city built on bones.” Construction was hampered by floods, which also ravaged the city in 1777, 1824, 1924, and 1955. Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, improved upon her father’s vision by commissioning European architects such as Bartolomeo Rastrelli to construct baroque landmarks, including Winter Palace, the Smolny Institute, and the palaces of Tsarskoe Selo. Catherine II (the Great) subsequently purchased the paintings, drawings, and other priceless artworks that are now the core of the Hermitage Museum’s holdings. She also established the Russian Academy of Arts to further aesthetic production, and she commissioned the Pavlovsk Palace, the Hermitage, and the Tauride Palace, later the meeting place of the first Duma and the Provisional Government. The city’s remarkable transformation from swamp to showcase paralleled the emergence of Russia as a major European power, from Peter’s 1709 victory over the Swedes at Poltava to Alexander I’s 1814 arrival in Paris. The city came to represent precisely this change from isolation to European integration. Petersburg’s growing symbolic dominance preoccupied the country’s intelligentsia and nobility alike, with Tsar Nicholas I

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An eighteenth-century engraving of Peter the Great supervising the construction of St. Petersburg. © BETTMANN/CORBIS

complaining that “Petersburg is Russian but it is not Russia.” During the imperial era, Russia’s leading politicians, intellectuals, and cultural figures were brought together by the major institutions based in St. Petersburg to generate events that vitally affected the life of every member of Russian society. The Decembrist uprising of 1825 culminated in Senate (now Decembrist) Square. In January 1905, Father Gapon led a peaceful march of workers and their families to the Winter Palace to petition the tsar; the resulting slaughter is remembered as Bloody Sunday. Following that tragedy, the workers of St. Petersburg became increasingly militant. Forced to live and work in squalor due to Russia’s rapid forced industrialization, they began to protest and strike for improved conditions.

as representative of imperial Russia’s new military and industrial might. But with industrialization there also emerged a surging revolutionary movement, and “Red Petrograd” soon became the “cradle of the Revolution.” UNDER THE SOVIETS

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the city was the fifth-largest in Europe, behind London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, and was widely viewed

With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Nicholas II russified the capital city’s name to Petrograd. In the early days of the war, the streets of Petrograd were filled with young men volunteering for military service. But as Russian losses mounted and the economy declined still further, Petrograd became the focus of anti-tsarist sentiment. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, founded in 1917 and modeled on a 1905 organization, was the most active. In March (February O.S.) 1917, workers struck and soldiers mutinied, leading to the eventual abdication of Nicholas II. A Provisional Government was in-

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stalled, but constantly battled the Petrograd Soviet for control of the city. During the “July Days,” the Soviet nearly succeeded in gaining power. On November 7 (October 25, O.S.), members of Trotsky’s Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace, and the Provisional Government fled. For the next seventyfour years, the communists would control Russia. The Soviet regime’s shift of its seat of government to Moscow in March 1918 stripped Petrograd of many of its most creative and powerful institutions and prominent individuals. The city was renamed Leningrad after the death of Lenin in 1924. Its standing was further undermined by the December 1934 assassination of Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov in his office at the Smolny Institute, which precipitated Josef Stalin’s mass purges. Mass graves containing the victims were still being discovered outside the city as recently as 2002. World War II took a particularly heavy toll on Leningrad. For nine hundred days the Germans laid siege to the city, and there were anywhere from 700,000 to more than 1 million civilian deaths from attack and starvation. Although the Nazis never entered the city proper, they looted and burned many of the palaces in the environs, including Peterhof and the Catherine Palace. During the post-Stalin era Leningrad was an important economic and intellectual center, though still trailing Moscow. Aside from Kirov, one of Leningrad’s best-known political leaders was the rather ironically named Grigory Romanov. As first secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Party Committee from 1970 to 1983, Romanov encouraged production and scientific associations, as well as links among such groups to innovate and implement new technologies. As a result, Leningrad achieved enviable production levels. Romanov also made use of the city’s extensive scientific establishment, linking the research and production sectors to improve production.

THE POST-SOVIET ERA

Although Romanov eschewed Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, other Leningrad leaders embraced the changes. Anatoly Sobchak was elected to the first USSR Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 and in 1991 became the city’s first elected mayor. A major figure in Russia’s democratic movement, Sobchak oversaw a difficult transition in his city. His resistance to the hardline August 1991 putsch was critical to its defeat. Following the coup’s collapse,


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Sobchak immediately renamed the city St. Petersburg. As the city’s economy suffered under the national shift to capitalism, St. Petersburg experienced a severe rise in organized crime. Sobchak was unable to eradicate corruption, and in 1996 lost his bid for reelection to Vladmir Yakovlev. St. Petersburg is the cultural capital of Russia. Among its most famous residents were the painters Marc Chagall and Ilya Repin; the writers Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the composers Peter Tchaikovsky and Dmitry Shoshtakovich; and the choreographers Marius Petipa and Sergei Diaghilev. Among its many art galleries, the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, and the Stieglitz boast collections unparalleled in the world. St. Petersburg is the home of the renowned Mariinsky ballet company (known as the Kirov in Soviet times). Shostakovich named his Seventh Symphony Leningrad. Falconet’s Bronze Horseman sculpture of Peter the Great, located in Decembrist Square, was commissioned by Catherine the Great and immortalized by Pushkin in a poem of the same name. Many palaces and Orthodox churches have been restored, including the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and the Kazan Cathedral. On the north bank of the Neva, the Peter and Paul Fortress has a long history as both a prison and, in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, the burial site of all the Romanov tsars from Peter I to Nicholas II. St. Petersburg had begun to recapture some its lost splendor by 2003. UNESCO designated the city a World Heritage site. Extensive renovation, funded in part by a $31 million loan from the World Bank, took place in preparation for the city’s tercentennial celebration in May 2003. Partly contributing to the city’s renaissance was the fact that President Vladimir Putin was born in St. Petersburg. In addition to promoting the tercentennial commemoration, Putin oversaw the renovation of the Peterhof Palace into a world-class conference center. There was also talk of creating a presidential residence in St. Petersburg and even some sentiment to move the capital from Moscow. Whether or not St. Petersburg regains the political eminence of a century ago, it remains a vibrant, culturally rich European city, much as Peter envisioned.

See also:

ACADEMY OF ARTS; ADMIRALTY; BLOODY SUN-

DAY; CATHERINE II; DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; ELIZABETH; MUSEUM, HERMITAGE; PETER I; PETER AND PAUL FORTRESS; WINTER PALACE

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Glantz, David M. (2002). The Battle for Leningrad, 1941–1944. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. McAuley, Mary. (1991). Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917–1922. New York: Oxford University Press. McKean, Robert B. (1990). St. Petersburg between the Revolutions, June 1907–February 1917. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ruble, Blair A. (1989). Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sablinsky, Walter. (1976). The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1969). The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. New York: Harper & Row. ANN E. ROBERTSON BLAIR A. RUBLE

Carter withdrew his support after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. While the SALT agreements represent important progress in terms of quantitative arms limitation, a significant flaw was that they failed to address the issue of qualitative advancements in weapons systems—which threatened the utility of the MAD regime. This qualitative problem was addressed in the subsequent Strategic Arms Reduction Talks.

See also:

ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY; ARMS CON-

TROL; DÉTENTE; STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TALKS; STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Payne, Samuel B., Jr. (1980). The Soviet Union and SALT. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolfe, Thomas W. (1979). The SALT Experience. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. MATTHEW O’GARA

STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TREATIES Coming on the heels of the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the two components of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT) represented a willingness by the United States and the Soviet Union to constrain an arms race that both recognized was costly and potentially destabilizing. Soviet nuclear advantage in the early 1970s concerned the United States, and the Soviets recognized that American fears would likely translate into a massive weapons program aimed at regaining nuclear superiority. Thus the Soviet Union chose to forsake short-term advantage in favor of guaranteed parity over the long term. Both sides agreed that strategic parity would significantly contribute to stability. The chief products of SALT I were the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, and an interim agreement which set limits on the total number of offensive missiles allowable (further addressed in SALT II). The ABM Treaty limited the number of defensive weapons, indicating that both the United States and the Soviet Union accepted the idea that mutual vulnerability would increase stability— thereby institutionalizing mutual assured destruction (MAD). SALT II limited the total number of all types of strategic nuclear weapons. However, although agreed upon by both countries, SALT II was never ratified because American President Jimmy

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STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TALKS The Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) were predicated on the concept of “minimum deterrence”—a regime in which both the United States and the Soviet Union would reduce nuclear arsenals to the minimum level needed to deter the other from attempting a first strike. As with previous bilateral nuclear weapons treaties between the United States and the USSR, the goal of START was to reduce the costs associated with a gratuitous arms buildup, while simultaneously increasing system stability by ensuring mutual vulnerability. Prior agreements limited the number of weapons each nation possessed, but advancements in technology made these previously agreed upon levels untenable to the United States; in the early 1980s it was perceived that the Soviet Union was close to a first strike capability—the ability to attack enough targets in the United States so as to prevent a retaliatory strike. This perception of a “window of vulnerability” prompted the Reagan Administration to undertake a massive weapons modernization program, in addition to pursuing the proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The Soviets believed that SDI was destabilizing and therefore were willing to make cuts in offensive nuclear arms in exchange for re-


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strictions on American research and development of space-based defensive systems. As with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT), the Soviet Union was once again forsaking short-term superiority in favor of long-term stability. START mandated cuts in the number of nuclear delivery systems by about 40 percent, reduced the number of warheads by roughly 30 percent, and also established more complete verification procedures. The treaty was signed by President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on July 31, 1991 in Moscow.

See also:


TROL; DÉTENTE; STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kartchner, Kerry M. (1992). Negotiating START: Strategic Arms Reduction Talks and the Quest for Strategic Stability. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Mazarr, Michael J. (1991). START and the Future of Deterrence. New York: St. Martin’s Press. MATTHEW O’GARA

I G O R

F Y O D O R O V I C H

After Reagan’s SDI speech, General Secretary Yuri Andropov denounced the program, telling a Pravda reporter that if Washington implemented SDI, the “floodgates of a runaway race of all types of strategic arms, both offensive and defensive” would open. Painfully aware of U.S. scientific and engineering skills, the Soviet leadership sought to eschew a costly technological arms race in which the United States was stronger. With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and USSR, signing of the START I and II treaties, and the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, the SDI received lower budgetary priority (like many other weapons programs). In 1993 Defense Secretary Les Aspin announced the abandonment of SDI and its replacement by a less costly program that would make use of ground-based antimissile systems. The SDIO was then replaced by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). In contrast to the actual expenditures on SDI (about $30 billion), spending on BMDO programs exceeded $4 billion annually in the late 1990s.

See also:


TROL; DÉTENTE; STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TALKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anzovin, Steven. (1986). The Star Wars Debate. New York: Wilson.

STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a United States military research program that President Ronald Reagan first proposed in March 1983, shortly after branding the USSR an “evil empire.” Its goal was to intercept incoming missiles in midcourse, high above the earth, hence making nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Nicknamed “Star Wars” by the media, the program entailed the use of space- and ground-based nuclear X-ray lasers, subatomic particle beams, and computer-guided projectiles fired by electromagnetic rail guns—all under the central control of a supercomputer system. The Reagan administration peddled the program energetically within the United States and among NATO allies. In April 1984 a Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was established within the Department of Defense. The program’s futuristic weapons technologies, several of which were only in a preliminary research stage in the mid-1980s, were projected to cost anywhere from $100 billion to $1 trillion.


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Boffey, Philip M. (1988). Claiming the Heavens: The New York Times Complete Guide to the Star Wars Debate. New York: Times Books. FitzGerald, Frances. (2000). Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Simon & Schuster. FitzGerald, Mary C. (1987). Soviet Views on SDI. Pittsburgh, PA: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh. Teller, Edward. (1987). Better a Shield than a Sword: Perspectives on Defense and Technology. New York: Free Press. JOHANNA GRANVILLE

STRAVINSKY, IGOR FYODOROVICH (1882–1971), Russian composer. Among the most influential composers of the twentieth century, Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky epitomized the new prominence of Russian emigré

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creative artists and their presence on the international scene in the years following the 1917 Revolution. Like the contributions of his emigré colleague writer Vladimir Nabokov and choreographer George Balanchine-Stravinsky’s enormous contribution to his art significantly altered the course of twentieth-century music. Stravinsky’s compositions encompass every important musical trend of the period (neonationalism, neoclassicism, and serialism, to name a few) and include examples of all the major Western concert genres (opera, ballet, symphony, choral works, solo works, and numerous incidental works, including a polka for circus elephants). The son of a St. Petersburg opera singer, Stravinsky attained international fame with his early ballet, The Firebird (1910), composed for Sergei Diagilev’s Ballets Russes (with choreography by Michel Fokine). Several important ballets followed, including Petrushka (1911, also with Fokine) and the seminal Rite of Spring (1913, choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky), among the most famous works of art of the twentieth century. Stravinsky’s compositions for the theater continued to trace a path through the most significant musical and theatrical idioms of his century, and include Les Noces (1923, choreography by Bronislava Nijinska), Apollon musagète (1928), and Agon (1957, both choreographed by Balanchine). Although Stravinsky was a supremely cosmopolitan figure, his music nonetheless retained traces of its Russian origins throughout his long career.

See also:

DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH; FIREBIRD; MUSIC;

PETRUSHKA BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stravinsky, Vera, and Craft, Robert. (1978). Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents. New York: Simon and Schuster. Taruskin, R. (1996). Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Eric Walter. (1979). Stravinsky: the Composer and His Works. Berkeley: University of California Press.

armed with firearms, organized into tactical units of five hundred, commanded and trained by officers from the nobility. These units were based from the beginning in towns, and eventually took on the character of garrison forces. Over time their numbers grew from three thousand in 1550 to fifty thousand in 1680. Militarily, they were ineffectual, mainly because of their economic character. The musketeers were a hereditary class not subject to taxation, but to state service requirements, including battlefield service, escort, and guard duties. During the seventeenth century, the state provided them with grain and cash, but economic privileges, including permission to act as merchants, artisans, or farmers, became their principal support. One particular plum was permission to produce alcoholic beverages for their own consumption. They also bore civic duties (fire fighting and police) in the towns where they lived. Pursuing economic interests reduced their fighting edge. Throughout the seventeenth century the musketeers proved to be fractious, regularly threatening, even killing, officers who mistreated them or represented modernizing elements within the military. By 1648 it was apparent that they were unreliable, especially when compared with the new-formation regiments appearing prior to the Thirteen Years War (1654–1667) under leadership of European mercenary officers. Rather than disband the musketeers entirely, the state made attempts to westernize them. Many units were placed under the command of foreigners and retrained. Administrative changes were made during and after the war, including placing certain units under the jurisdiction of the tsar’s Privy Chancery, which appointed officers and collected operations reports. The Privy Chancery, and by extension, the tsar, was at the center of the attempt to transform the musketeers into more thoroughly trained westernstyle infantry.

The musketeers, or streltsy (literally “shooters”), were organized as part of Ivan IV’s effort to reform Russia’s military during the sixteenth century. In 1550 he recruited six companies of foot soldiers

Further pressure to reform included official neglect, even to the point of refusing to give the musketeers weapons. Later decrees (1681, 1682) replaced cash payments with grants of unsettled lands as compensation for service. This change in support reduced their status, without improving their overall military effectiveness, and the musketeers vehemently opposed it. By 1680, many regiments had been retrained and officered by foreigners, but the conservative musketeers were anxious to be rid of the hated foreigners and regain their eroded

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prestige. Thus, in 1682, they were willing to believe rumors that Tsar Fyodor Alexeyevich had been poisoned, and were anxious to punish those responsible with death. Peter I’s (the Great) reign was marred by an uprising in 1698 of military units stationed in Moscow called musketeers or streltsy (literally, “shooters”). The musketeers disliked the tsar’s westernizing policies and governing style. Peter rejected traditional behaviors and practices, including standards of dress, grooming, comportment, and faith, but more importantly, he sought to reform Russia’s military institutions, which threatened the musketeers’ historical prerogatives. Peter crushed the rebellion with great severity, executing nearly twelve hundred musketeers, and flogging and exiling another six hundred. The Moscow regiments were abolished and survivors sent to serve in provincial units, losing privileges, homes, and lands. They carried with them seeds of defiance that eventually bore fruit in Astrakhan in 1705–1706, and among the Cossacks in 1707– 1708. Although the last Moscow regiments of musketeers disappeared before 1713, the musketeers continued to exist in the provinces until after Peter’s death. Peter’s response to the 1698–1699 uprising may have arisen from his memories of the 1682 musketeer revolt. The musketeers suspected the Naryshkins (Peter’s mother, Natalia’s family) of having poisoned Tsar Fyodor and of planning to kill the Tsarevich Ivan, both sons of Tsar Alexei’s first wife, Maria Miloslavskaya. The Miloslavskys encouraged these suspicions in order to use their regiments against the Naryshkins. On May 25, 1682, the musketeers attacked the Kremlin. Natalia Naryshkina showed Ivan and Peter to the rioting musketeers to prove they were still alive. Nonetheless, the rebellion was bloody, and the government was powerless because it had no forces capable of stopping the musketeers. From this rebellion came the joint reign of Ivan and Peter with their sister and half-sister, Sophia, who issued decrees in their names, and who was a favorite of the musketeers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1990). Sophia, Regent of Russia 1657–1704. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. W. M. REGER IV

STRIKES See

WORKERS.

STROIBANK Stroibank USSR (the All-Union Bank for Investment Financing) managed and financed government investment in the Soviet period. Founded as Prombank (the Industrial Bank) in October 1922, it merged with several smaller banks and became Stroibank during the April 1959 banking reform. The USSR Council of Ministers appointed its board of directors, and it was officially part of the Gosbank (State Bank of the USSR) network. It supported government investment both through direct (nonrepayable) financing and through short- and long-term credits. In 1972 Stroibank had over 1,200 subsidiary components throughout the USSR.

In 1698 the streltsy were unable to see that Peter I was implacable in his rejection of conservatism and that the musketeers represented for him a dangerous and disloyal element. In the final clash, the musketeers were unable to reshape their world, and eventually disappeared.

In 1988 a series of economic reforms created a two-tiered banking system in Russia. Gosbank became a central bank, while three specialized banks split from Gosbank. During this process, Stroibank USSR became Promstroibank USSR (the IndustrialConstruction Bank). During the battle for sovereignty between Russian and Soviet leaders in 1990 and 1991, Promstroibank USSR was commercialized and individual branches given the opportunity to strike out on their own or form smaller networks with other Promstroibank branches. The largest remnant of the Promstroibank network, Promstroibank Russia, remained under the control of former Promstroibank USSR director Yakov Dubnetsky. Promstroibank Russia remained a large and powerful bank throughout the 1990s, while many reorganized Promstroibank USSR branches retained strong positions in Russia’s regions and continued to serve their traditional clients. In the late 1990s, the state-owned energy giant Gazprom acquired a controlling interest in Promstroibank Russia.

See also: FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; IVAN IV; PETER I; SOPHIA;

See also:

WESTERNIZERS


BANKING SYSTEM, SOVIET; ECONOMY, POST-

SOVIET; GOSBANK; SBERBANK

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Johnson, Juliet. (2000). A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Nove, Alec. (1969). The Soviet Economy. An Introduction, 2nd ed. New York: Praeger. JULIA OBERTREIS

Kuschpèta, Olga. (1978). The Banking and Credit System of the USSR. Leiden, Netherlands: Nijhoff Social Sciences Division. JULIET JOHNSON

STRUVE, PETER BERNARDOVICH (1870–1944), liberal political leader, economist, and author.

STRUMILIN, STANISLAV GUSTAVOVICH (1877–1974), economist, statistician, and demographer. Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilo-Petrashkevich was a Social Democrat (Menshevik) before 1917. Involved in revolutionary activities, he was arrested several times. In the Soviet period, Strumilin held various high positions in the State Planning Board Gosplan (deputy chairman several times, chairman of the economic-statistical section during the 1920s) and in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1931 full membership and doctor of economics honoris causa). For decades he also worked as a professor. Strumilin published on economic planning, the economics of labor, industrial statistics, and economic history, and he took sides in all important economic debates. He combined theoretical argumentation with empirical statistics and also incorporated sociological perspectives (e.g., in his pioneering time-budget studies). During the politicized economic debates of the 1920s, he was a radical advocate of a planned economy and responsible for the drawing up of the First FiveYear-Plan. He opted for the teleological method of planning, which takes the final (production) targets as a starting point. His demographic works, among them a prediction regarding the number and age–sex composition of the population of Russia for 1921–1941, were influential in the Soviet Union and gained international attention. Strumilin managed to survive the purges of the Josef Stalin period and benefited from the rehabilitation of the economists after World War II. He then concentrated on labor issues and the impact of education on wage differentials, participated actively in the economic debates of the 1950s and 1960s, and published until 1973. He represented the first generation of Soviet Marxist economists.

See also:

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As a young man Peter Bernardovich Struve rose to prominence on the liberal left. In the 1890s he joined the Social Democratic party and authored its manifesto. He was then a proponent of a moderate legal Marxism. Struve, however, was not a doctrinaire. He was dedicated to learning and loved literature and poetry. By contrast, the Russian militants saw such a pursuit as a distraction from the task of revolution. As Russia moved toward revolution Struve moved toward a liberal conservatism. From 1902 to 1905 he edited the journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), a liberal publication. He eventually joined the Constitutional Democratic party (Cadet). In 1906 he won election as a deputy to the second Duma. In 1909 he contributed to Vekhi (Landmarks) as one of a group of prominent intellectuals who broke sharply with the militant leftists, seeing them as a threat to Russia’s liberation from despotism and its transformation into a liberal and democratic constitutional state. He was deeply patriotic as well as liberal in orientation. In 1911 he wrote a series entitled Patriotica. From 1907 to 1917 he engaged in scholarship as well as politics as a professor at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. After the 1917 October Revolution Struve briefly joined an antiBolshevik government in southern Russia and then was forced to emigrate to the West where he spent the remainder of his life as a scholar and writer on economics and politics.

See also:

CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; SOCIAL

DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; VEKHI

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pipes, Richard. (1970). Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870– 1905. Russian Research Center Studies, no. 64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pipes, Richard. (1980). Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944. Russian Research Center Studies, no. 80. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. CARL A. LINDEN

FIVE-YEAR PLANS; GOSPLAN; MENSHEVIKS


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STUKACH From the common slang word stukachestvo, stukach was widely used in the Soviet period to describe “squealing,” or informing on people to the government authorities. The word is evidently derived from stuk, Russian for the sound of a hammer blow. The government, and especially the security police, in all communist-ruled or authoritarian countries, depended on informers in order to keep tabs on the loyalty of the populace. In the Politics, Aristotle had observed that tyrannical regimes must employ informers hidden within the population in order to keep their hold on absolute power. In such countries as the USSR, Nazi Germany, Maoist China, Cuba, and so forth, informers were sometimes made heroes by the regime. Thus, in the Soviet Union, Pavlik Morozov, a twelve-year-old boy living in the Don farming region when Stalin was enforcing collectivization of the peasants’ farms in the early 1930s, became a stukach. He informed on his parents when they allegedly concealed grain and other produce from the authorities. The boy was killed by vengeful farmers. He was thereupon iconized as a martyr by the communist authorities. Statues of Pavlik sprang up throughout the country. The Soviet writer Maxim Gorky urged fellow writers to glorify the boy who had exposed his father as a kulak and who “had overcome blood kinship in discovering spiritual kinship.” Another well-known Soviet novelist, Leonid Leonov, depicted a fictitious scientist of the old generation who as a stukach had nobly betrayed his son to the authorities. Stukachestvo was expected of any and all family members, schoolchildren, concentration-camp prisoners, factory workers—in short, every Soviet citizen, all of whom were expected to place loyalty to the State above all other linkages.

See also: GORKY, MAXIM; MOROZOV, PAVEL TROFIMOVICH; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Galler, Meyer. (1977). Soviet Prison Camp Speech: A Survivor’s Glossary: Supplement. Hayward, CA: Soviet Studies. Heller, Mikhail, and Nekrich, Aleksandr. (1986). Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, tr. Phillis B. Carlos. London: Hutchinson.


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Preobrazhensky, A. G. (1951). Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language. New York: Columbia University Press. ALBERT L. WEEKS

STÜRMER, BORIS VLADIMIROVICH (1848–1917), government official who reached the rank of president of the State Council, or premier, of the Russian Empire. Boris Stürmer studied law at St. Petersburg University and then entered the Ministry of Justice. He was appointed governor of Novgorod Province in 1894 and of Yaroslav Province in 1896. In 1902 he became director of the Department of General Affairs of the Ministry of the Interior and in 1904 was appointed to the Council of State. From January to November 1916 he was president of the Council of State, serving simultaneously as minister of the interior (March–July) and minister of foreign affairs (July–November). Nicholas II dismissed Stürmer after Paul Milyukov’s famous “Is this stupidity or is it treason?” speech in the Duma, in which Milyukov accused Stürmer of being a German agent. In fact, he was not. Arrested after the February Revolution of 1917 and placed in the Peter and Paul Fortress, Stürmer died there in August 1917. Stürmer owed his rise to his arch-conservatism and friends in high places, including the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna and Grigory Rasputin, who reputedly referred to Stürmer as “a little man on a leash” and to whom Stürmer reported weekly and received instructions. Stürmer has received universal scorn. Contemporaries called him a “nonentity” (Vasily Shulgin), “totally ignorant of everything he undertook” (Milyukov), “a man of extremely limited mental gifts” (Nikolai Pokrovsky, his successor as minister of foreign affairs), “a man who had left a bad memory wherever he occupied an administrative post” (Sergei Sazonov), and “an utter nonentity” (Mikhail Rodzianko). Historians have seen Stürmer as “an instrument of the personal rule of the Empress [and Rasputin]” (Mikhail Florinsky), “a reactionary [who] brought discredit on the extreme Right” (Marc Ferro), and “an obscure and dismal product of the professional Russian bureaucracy” (Robert Massie).

See also:

ALEXANDRA FEDOROVNA; RASPUTIN, GRIGORY

YEFIMOVICH

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Florinsky, Mikhail. (1931). The End of the Russian Empire. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Fulop-Muller, Renee. (1929). Rasputin: The Holy Devil. New York: Viking Books. Miliukov, Paul. (1967). Political Memoirs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. SAMUEL A. OPPENHEIM

SUBBOTNIK Communist subbotniki (Communist Volunteer Saturday Workers) were shockworkers who volunteered their free Saturdays for the Bolshevik cause. Subbotniki were lauded as heroes of socialist labor, as prototypes of the new unselfish man, and role models for the working class. Their actions may have reflected spontaneous enthusiasm among some workers, but they were also encouraged by the Communist Party to mobilize effort. The phenomenon was a mixture of socialist idealism and coercion. The KS (Communist subbotniki) movement is said to have started by the communists on April 12, 1919 at the Moscow-Kazan railway depot, and was praised by Vladimir Lenin in an article entitled “Velikii pochin,” July 28, 1919. During the summer and autumn of 1919, KS mobilized to defeat Denikin, and surmount the “fuel crisis.” During World War II, the KS and voskresniki (Sunday volunteers) are said to have inspired the war effort. Celebrations commemorating their achievements and encouraging the movement’s continuation were held frequently during the seventies.

See also:

SOVIET MAN; STAKHANOVITE MOVEMENT

number of passengers carried daily increased from 177,000 to more than six million, making the Moscow system the world’s busiest. The Moscow metro organization also reproduced its various structures in similar metro systems across the former Soviet Union and behind the Iron Curtain. It became, in the words of one official, “the mother of all socialist metros.” Symbols of Soviet power accompanied riders in the metros of Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Baku, Tiflis, Tashkent, Minsk, Gorky, Erevan, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, and Volgograd—not to mention those systems built partly by Moscow engineers and architects in Poland and Czechoslovakia. For Soviet leaders, Soviet subways were more than transportation systems. The metro provided what one Soviet propagandist called “a majestic school in the formation of the new man.” For the 1935 inaugural line of the Moscow metro, the Soviets constructed each of the stations on different themes of socialist life. Stations celebrated Soviet leaders, the Communist Party, Soviet achievements in education, and the supposed superiority of the Soviet system. The Soviets lavished scarce resources on the first thirteen stations, including 23,000 square meters of marble facing, chandeliers, and crystal. Metro builders boasted that they used more marble in the first line of the Moscow metro than had been used in the entire Tsarist period. Through the end of the Stalin era, stations became more ornate and monumental as the metro grew. Like a mirror held up to Soviet self-perceptions, an elaborate political iconography reflected a sense of approaching perfection in Soviet society. To convey this message, architects calculated that a passenger would spend roughly five minutes per station. In the words of one: “Within that time the architecture, emblems, and entire artistic image should actively influence him.” Soviet subway systems thus celebrated Soviet socialism, provided a pulpit for preaching its values, and offered an effective way to get to work in the morning.

The original line of the Moscow metro, completed in May 1935, laid the foundation for one of the world’s most impressive subway systems. In its first fifty years, the Moscow metro grew from thirteen stations to more than 120, and the average

Lazar Kaganovich, a ruthless Bolshevik leader of working-class origin, assumed managerial responsibility for construction of the original metro line. His chief deputy on the project was Nikita Khrushchev, who later became general secretary of the Communist Party. Kaganovich believed that the metro “went far beyond . . . the typical understanding of a technological construction. Our metropolitan is a symbol of the new socialist society being built.” Under his management, the Soviets deployed a variety of improvised Western tech-

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niques to build the metro in the treacherous geology of Moscow’s subsoil, which was laced with underground rivers and quicksand. Builders bored through layers of Jurassic clay and fissured limestone, soaked with water. Khrushchev recalled that the builders had only “the vaguest idea of what the job would entail.” The party mobilized public opinion to gather necessary resources and labor. Days of voluntary labor became festive occasions as bands played and able-bodied Muscovites roamed the shafts looking for work. Prominent officials picked up shovels and joined Moscow’s masses. Compared to the construction of the New York subway system, however, only a handful of Soviet workers died—and the Soviets trumpeted the successful construction as proof of the superiority of the socialist order. Nonetheless, the Soviets benefited greatly from the long experience of foreign engineers who had helped construct the world’s other great subway systems. They used the drafts of a failed 1908 Moscow subway plan, whose backers were unable to secure financing. Soviet engineers visited the Berlin subway, studied engineering plans for the London and Paris subways, and hired American engineers as consultants. The story of the first Soviet subway was as much the subject of Soviet propaganda as the actual metro stations. Soviet memoirs, official histories, metro architecture, and newspaper accounts wove the events and personalities of the metro’s construction into a mythical microcosm of the new Soviet society. The epic tale of its construction, which was recounted in two elaborately bound volumes published in 1935, relayed an ideal conception of socialist engineering and its ability to conquer and transform nature (human and otherwise). In this story, successful technological construction did more than fulfill the party plan for transportation; it proved the inevitable success of the revolution and the party’s vision of itself as an instrument of a supposedly scientifically determined historical destiny.

See also:

KAGANOVICH, LAZAR MOYSEYEVICH; KHRUSH-

L A W

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Josephson, Paul. (1995). “‘Projects of the Century’ in Soviet History: Large-Scale Technologies from Lenin to Gorbachev.” Technology and Culture 36:519-559. ANDREW JENKS

SUCCESSION, LAW ON Peter I published the Law on Succession, a manifesto on the succession to the Russian imperial throne, on February 16, 1722. The Law on Succession was the first such written law in Russian history. Russia’s rulers in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries favored primogeniture (inheritance by the first-born son), although this custom could be bypassed for pragmatic reasons. Peter, prompted by the defection of his eldest son Alexei (condemned to death for treason in 1718), and by the death of his only surviving son in 1719, rejected primogeniture and issued a succession law. The new law required the reigning monarch to nominate his successor with regard to worthiness. It placed no restrictions on age or gender, but it did not specifically direct the reigning monarch to look beyond the imperial family, by raising a commoner, for example. The work The Justice of the Monarch’s Right to Appoint the Heir to the Throne (1722), attributed to Feofan Prokopovich, justified the new law with reference to scripture, history, and natural law. Peter himself died without nominating a successor, but Alexander Menshikov claimed to be implementing Peter’s wishes by choosing his widow Catherine, thereby inaugurating a period of female rule. Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine II all nominated their own successors, while Elizabeth and Catherine II took the throne from legally nominated emperors on the pretext of protecting the common good. Paul I repealed the law in 1797, replacing it with a new law based on primogeniture.

CHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY

See also:

PAUL I; PETER I; PROKOPOVICH, FEOFAN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bobrick, Benson. (1981). Labyrinths of Iron: A History of the World’s Subways. New York: Newsweek Books.

Lentin, Antony, ed. and tr. (1996). Peter the Great: His Law on the Imperial Succession: The Official Commentary. Oxford: Headstart History.

Jenks, Andrew. (2000). “A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization.” Technology and Culture 41:697-724.


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SUCCESSION OF LEADERSHIP, SOVIET Like other authoritarian systems, the USSR did not adopt a formal system of succession. Over time, the system developed an informal process of succession, which eventually evolved into a predictable pattern. In 1922, at the age of 52, Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader, suffered a major stroke from which he never fully recovered. After his death in 1924, there was considerable struggle within the Politburo of the Communist Party before Josef Stalin emerged as the top leader. Since Lenin had functioned as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (later called the Council of Ministers), the emergence of the general secretary as the preeminent leader was not predictable. Lenin’s position was equivalent to that of prime minister. The general secretary initially had been considered an administrator with little policy responsibility. Despite the fact that Stalin led the USSR for almost thirty years, it was not clear after his death that the position of general secretary of the CPSU would remain the preeminent one. Stalin had been prime minister also since 1941, and it was hard to say where his power base lay. After Stalin’s death, Georgy Malenkov chose to be prime minister when forced to select between the positions of chairman of the Council of Ministers or general secretary of the Communist Party. The less well-known Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the top leader in the succession struggle that ensued during the next five years through his role as first (renamed from general) secretary of the Communist Party. By 1958 Khrushchev was both prime minister and first secretary, although not with the degree of power that Stalin had had before him. Leonid Brezhnev also used the position of general secretary to rise to the top position within the collective leadership after Khrushchev was deposed. Although he wanted to be prime minister as well, the Politburo denied him that title in the interest of maintaining collective leadership. In 1977 Brezhnev became president of the USSR (chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet), a nominal position that gave him the position of chief of state in international protocol, even though his power base remained the CPSU. With the death of Brezhnev (1982), the process flowed smoothly in the appointment of Yuri Andropov as both general secretary and president, and a short time later both titles passed to Konstantin Chernenko after Andropov’s death (1984). Within

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the Politburo there appeared to be agreement on a successor and on giving the top leader both a party and government position. There was nothing in either the Party Charter or the Soviet Constitution to guarantee that the process would remain the same. After the death of Chernenko in 1985, power passed to a younger generation. Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary, after serving as de facto second secretary under both Andropov and Chernenko. Gorbachev, however, did not become president. The title went to an elder statesman, Andrei Gromyko. Only in 1988 did Gorbachev assume the presidency, which was subsequently restructured as part of perestroika (restructuring) and demokratizatsiya (democratization). Gorbachev had the real power, not merely the title, of chief of state and functioned as president in both domestic and international politics. Had the Soviet system continued, it is fair to say that succession would probably have been institutionalized in the constitution. Even under Gorbachev, however, the Soviet president was not popularly elected. Gorbachev was selected by the restructured parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies; a new Supreme Soviet, selected from the Congress, was a working parliament, not merely a rubber stamp that met once or twice per year. Even without formal institutionalization, political succession had become predictable, especially by the 1980s when the ailing Andropov and Chernenko were successively chosen to lead the USSR. The selection process was concluded within days of the leader’s death. The selection of Gorbachev seemed to be equally smooth, but when one examines the difficult road that Gorbachev pursued to undertake reform, one realizes how superficial consensus was. Gorbachev faced opposition from the conservatives and liberals within the Politburo and the CPSU throughout his tenure. Political succession, although never formalized in writing, became, nonetheless, a well-established and even reasonably predictable process in the mature Soviet Union. The failure to establish a constitutional succession process, even after Gorbachev’s democratization, was one of many contributing factors in the rapid demise of the USSR after the 1991 attempted coup.

See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; GENERAL SECRETARY; POLITBURO; PRIME MINISTER


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bialer, Seweryn. (1980). Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press. Breslauer, George W. (1982). Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders. London: George Allen and Unwin. Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Agostino, Anthony. (1988). Soviet Succession Struggles: Kremlinology and the Russian Question from Lenin to Gorbachev. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Hough, Jerry F. (1980). Soviet Leadership in Transition. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Hough, Jerry F., and Fainsod, Merle. (1979). How the Soviet Union Is Governed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mitchell, R. Judson. Getting to the Top in the USSR: Cyclical Patterns in the Leadership Succession Process. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Simmonds, George W., ed. (1967). Soviet Leaders. New York: Crowell. NORMA C. NOONAN

SUDEBNIK OF 1497 The 1497 Sudebnik was Russia’s first national law code. Unlike earlier immunity charters, which pertained only to a private landholder and his land, and the Dvina Land Charter (1397) and White Lake Charter (1488), which pertained only to particular localities, it promulgated rules of general application for Muscovite courts. Adopted after Ivan III had gathered in the lands of Novgorod, Tver, and other principalities, the Code is usually interpreted as part of Ivan’s policy of nationbuilding. The short preamble states that the Code was adopted by Grand Prince Ivan with his children and boyars. Thus, unlike some of Muscovy’s other legislation, it was not associated with an assembly of important prelates and servicemen. A single copy of the Code has come down to us, which was found and published by Pavel Stroev in 1817. Most modern editors divide it into sixtyeight articles, but the original also contains thirtyseven chapter headings. Articles 1 through 25, in general, concern courts presided over by boyars and okolnichy, the two highest service ranks, with some attention also to the court of the grand prince. Clerks (dyaki) were to sit with the boyars and okol-


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nichy in these courts, and were to prepare not only a written trial record but also a written judgment. These courts were to exercise jurisdiction over major crimes, such as murder, robbery, and theft, and the death penalty was provided for certain crimes. Articles 26 through 36 concern judicial documents such as summonses, warrants, and default judgments, as well as the duties of judicial officials such as bailiffs. The bailiffs were charged not only with serving such judicial documents but also with interrogating suspected criminals. Articles 37 through 45 concern the courts of the namestniki and volosteli, the grand prince’s vicegerents in rural areas. The jurisdiction of these courts depended on whether the judge was granted full jurisdiction. Many of the provisions of the first section are repeated in the third. The Code thus either established or confirmed the previous existence of at least three levels of courts: that of the grand prince, that of the boyars and okolnichy, and that of the vicegerents. These were probably not permanent or standing courts in the modern sense, because the officials serving as judges had substantial other administrative and military duties. All courts used documents at nearly every stage of judicial proceedings: to initiate the lawsuit, to summon the defendant, to procure attendance of witness, and to record the judgment. The first three sections of the code are largely devoted to the procedural and more specifically the financial side of litigation. No less than thirty-six articles deal with fees and payments to be made to the court, and another fifteen concern damages and payments to private persons. Prohibition of bribery is mentioned several times. Plainly one of the priorities of the Code was to prevent bribery and the exaction of excessive fees. There are also numerous provisions on judicial duels, but actual court records indicate that such duels were seldom used to resolve litigation. Eyewitnesses and torture are also prescribed to resolve certain types of matters. The 1497 Code thus represents the transition, albeit incomplete, from so-called archaic law, characterized by composition (bloodwite), no judicial officials, and irrational modes of proof (trial by ordeal and combat), to a modern system of criminal penalties, judges and other judicial officials, and the use of witnesses and documents as evidence. The Code was also significant in introducing or confirming a document-based system of litigation. The fourth section, starting at article 46, contains miscellaneous rules of substantive versus

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procedural law, the most famous of which is article 57, which requires a peasant to pay his lord a certain fee in the week before or the week after St. George’s day if he is to have the right to move elsewhere. There are also various provisions on inheritance, manumission of slaves, loans, and boundaries. The fourth section, however, does not contain all of the substantive rules of law that would be necessary to administer justice. For example, most of the reported cases of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries deal with title to and ownership of land, but the Code contains virtually no rules or standards for deciding such cases. Because the Code is primarily a procedural statute and contains only an incomplete listing of substantive rules of law, one might ask where the judges would look to find the substantive rules. Commentators have suggested that the judges would look to customary law or to certain Byzantine law manuals. Another possibility is that, in most cases, judges simply applied their own rough sense of justice, and that litigation was not generally conceived as the application of published or even customary rules.

See also:

IVAN III; LAW CODE OF 1649; LEGAL SYSTEMS;

MUSCOVY; OKOLNICHY; SUDEBNIK OF 1550; SUDEBNIK OF 1589

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dewey, Horace W. (1956). “The 1497 Sudebnik: Muscovite Russia’s First National Law Code.” The American Slavic and East European Review 15:325–338. Dewey, Horace W., ed. (1966). Muscovite Judicial Texts, 1488–1556. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature. GEORGE G. WEICKHARDT

deals with the central courts, held before the grand prince, his boyars, and his okolnichy; the second (articles 45–61) deals with judicial documents and the duties of bailiffs; the third (articles 62–75) deals with the provincial and rural courts held before the tsar’s vicegerents; and the fourth (starting with article 76) contains provisions of substantive law on such subjects as slavery, disputes over land, inheritance, and the sale of chattels and other goods. Like the 1497 Code, the 1550 Sudebnik is primarily a procedural statute, and a large number of its provisions deal with the financial side of litigation: fees, penalties, amounts to be recovered in civil disputes. The 1550 Code is, however, more than twice the length of the 1497 Code. Its additional and different provisions probably reflect what its draftsmen thought was in need of amendment: that is, where the previous statute was perceived as not working or in need of clarification. While the 1497 Code simply prohibits bribery and favoritism, the 1550 Code provides specific penalties for these offenses, including fines and knouting. One new set of provisions (articles 22–24) deals with bringing suit in the central courts against vicegerents, which probably indicates that corruption and misfeasance by rural officials was perceived as an important problem. Procedure in the provincial and rural courts was also regulated in much more detail. One of the obvious goals of the 1550 amendments was thus to strengthen the provisions designed to counter corruption and favoritism. Another provision prohibits the issuance of new immunity charters, under which landholders, usually monasteries, had received jurisdiction over all legal cases except major crimes. The prohibition of further immunity charters increased the centralization of the administration of justice and reduced the legal rights of the monasteries.

The structure of the text closely follows that of the 1497 Code: the first section (articles 1–44)

Two other new provisions (25–26) provide that assault without robbery is to be treated as dishonor (beschestie), an offense that also included defamation. The amount to be recovered by the dishonored party is set forth. Various rational modes of proof, such as an inquest (obysk) in the community, are set forth in greater detail than in the earlier code. Some changes from the 1497 Code are, however, only as to form and provide additional detail. For example, articles 8–14 of the 1497 Code, which deal with prosecuting various crimes, were expanded and moved, somewhat illogically, to the second section of the 1550 Code (articles 53–60). The 1550 Code nevertheless represents a more advanced and complete transition from archaic law,

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SUDEBNIK OF 1550 The 1550 Sudebnik was a law code compiled by Ivan IV (the Terrible) and his boyars. In 1551 it was submitted for confirmation to the Hundred Chapters Church Council (Stoglav), on which sat the highest clerical officials. It proclaims that it is to govern all criminal and civil litigation. While the protograph is not extant, forty-three remarkably consistent copies survive. In all copies the text is divided into ninety-nine or one hundred articles.

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which was characterized by composition, irrational modes of proof, and the absence of judicial officials, to a relatively modern system of criminal penalties, rational modes of proof, and the use of judges to resolve disputes. It nonetheless still contains several provisions on judicial duels (although, in fact, such duels were seldom used). There were several significant additions to the provisions on substantive law in the fourth section. Six sections on slavery describe in detail how one becomes a slave, such as by selling oneself to pay a debt; how a slave can be manumitted; the documents associated with slavery; and new provisions that create a rule of caveat emptor with respect to purchase of a fugitive slave. Section 85 codified the right to redemption by the seller’s clan as to land sold by any clan member. Such land could be redeemed by a clan member within forty years at the original purchase price. While the provisions of substantive law are set forth in more detail than in the 1497 Code, the 1550 Code still does not purport to set forth all principles of substantive law. Important rules, such as how to resolve disputes over the ownership of land, remained subject to customary rules or to the discretion of the judge. In its attempt to deter corruption and its greater detail as to both procedural and substantive matters, the 1550 Code demonstrates the progress of the Muscovite legal systems to a system more predictable and rational.

See also:

CHURCH COUNCIL, HUNDRED CHAPTERS; IVAN

IV; LAW CODE OF 1649; LEGAL SYSTEMS; SUDEBNIK OF 1497; SUDEBNIK OF 1589 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dewey, Horace W. (1962). “The 1550 Sudebnik as an Instrument of Reform.” Jahrbuecher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas 10(2):161–180. Dewey, Horace W., ed. (1966). Muscovite Judicial Texts, 1488–1556. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature.

S O T N Y A

1497 and 1550, the last in 1606. This series of legal compilations was crowned by the Ulozhenie of 1649, one of the greatest of all Russian legislative documents and one of the most impressive in the entire early modern world. The codes of 1497, 1550, 1606, and 1649 were all promulgated by governments in Moscow, but the Sudebnik of 1589 was compiled anonymously in the Russian North, the Dvina Land, for unknown purposes. The 1550 Sudebnik remained the major operational legal code throughout Muscovy for the next ninety-nine years—to the extent that there was one during and after the Time of Troubles. Few copies of the 1589 document are extant, but it is known that it was occasionally cited by others— probably because it contained the 1550 Sudebnik and its seventy-three supplemental articles, as well as special laws of interest to the Dvina Land. The Sudebnik of 1589 has been thoroughly studied, and it is known which of its 289 articles originated in which of the sixty-eight articles of the Sudebnik of 1497 and in which of the one hundred articles of the Sudebnik of 1550. About 64 percent of the 1589 code’s articles originated in 1550 (some of them were expanded), about 9 percent came from statutes of 1556, and about 27 percent were new. By 1589 Russian law had completed the move from the medieval dyadic legal system to the more modern triadic system. In the medieval era, state authority barely existed, and law was as much a device for raising revenue by officials as it was a tool for conflict resolution. In the first third of the sixteenth century, state officials began to play a much more active, inquisitional role in the judicial process and tried both to deter and to solve crimes. Medieval wrongs were treated as torts, but by 1589 they were regarded as crimes. Crimes included murder, arson, battery, robbery, theft, treason, bribe-taking, rebellion, recidivism, sacrilege, slander, and perjury. Sanctions included fines, capital and corporal punishment, mutilation, and incarceration.

GEORGE G. WEICKHARDT

SUDEBNIK OF 1589 The Sudebnik of 1589 was the third in a series of four Russian legal monuments by that name. They comprise the core of middle Muscovite jurisprudence. The first two Sudebniki were compiled in


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Around 1550 the importance of literacy increased dramatically, and Muscovy began its transition from an oral society to one in which documents were increasingly important. The evolution was crucial in the laws of evidence, as faithbased evidence such as oaths, ordeals, and the casting of lots began to yield to written evidence. Witnesses, visual confrontations, general investigations, and confessions also grew in importance.

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The law as a revenue instrument for officials remained strong in 1589, and those officials were not supposed to be corrupt. The 1589 code paid considerable attention to establishing judicial procedures. There was considerable social legislation in the 1589 Sudebnik. Slaves of various sorts were mentioned, as was the fact that the peasants, discussed frequently, were in the process of being enserfed. Only perhaps 2 percent of the population were townsmen, but commerce was important in the Dvina Land. The collection of interest was permitted, at a maximum of 20 percent per year. Like most law, the Sudebnik of 1589 was concerned with cleaning up “social messes” and providing an infrastructure for the orderly resolution of conflicts in property and inheritance disputes, especially important in the Dvina Land where peasants still owned most of the land. Priority was also given to the preservation of the social order, particularly male dominance and other gender distinctions.

See also: LAW CODE OF 1649; LEGAL SYSTEMS; MUSCOVY; SUDEBNIK OF 1497; SUDEBNIK OF 1550

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hellie, Richard. (1965). “Muscovite Law and Society: The Ulozhenie of 1649 as a Reflection of the Political and Social Development of Russia since the Sudebnik of 1589.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. Hellie, Richard. (1992). “Russian Law From Oleg to Peter the Great.” Foreword to The Laws of Rus’: Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, tr. and ed. Daniel H. Kaiser. Salt Lake City, UT: Charles Schlacks.

to local authorities and received higher compensation when dishonored. However, Sukonnaya sotnya members were not allowed to purchase estates of patrimonial land or to travel abroad. Less prosperous than their counterparts in the other two corporations, Sukonnaya sotnya members tended to assist other government merchants and administer smaller enterprises. However, they were held responsible for shortfalls in revenue collection. In the early seventeenth century, there were 250 members of the Sukonnaya sotnya This figure declined to 130 in 1630 and to 116 by 1649, despite the appointment of 156 members between 1635 and 1646. In spite of the government’s demands, not all members of the Sukonnaya sotnya had houses in Moscow. Sukonnaya sotnya steadily declined in importance in the second half of the seventeenth century. By 1678 there were only fifty-one houses belonging to Sukonnaya sotnya members in the capital. Apparently, the corporation was effectively disbanded in the 1680s, and many of its members joined the Gostinaya sotnya. By the early eighteenth century, all members of the Sukonnaya sotnya were registered in guilds, in 1724 in Moscow and four years later in the rest of the country.

See also:

GOSTI; GOSTINAYA SOTNYA; MERCHANTS

JARMO T. KOTILAINE

RICHARD HELLIE

SULTAN-GALIEV, MIRZA KHAIDARGALIEVICH SUKONNAYA SOTNYA A privileged corporation of merchants. Sukonnaya sotnya (Cloth[iers’] Hundred) was a privileged corporation of merchants who were ranked third in importance and wealth below the gosti and members of the Gostinaya sotnya. Sukonnaya sotnya was formed in the late sixteenth century and based on previously extant corporations of clothiers in Moscow and elsewhere.

(1892–1940), prominent Tatar Bolshevik and Soviet activist during the Russian Revolution and civil war. Mirza Khaidargalievich Sultan-Galiev’s rapid rise to prominence, sudden fall from grace, and subsequent vilification in Stalin’s Russia has provided several generations with a metaphor for the promise and frustrations of early Soviet nationality policy.

The legal status of Sukonnaya sotnya members was defined by a charter issued to them at the turn of the seventeenth century. Members were exempt from direct taxation. They were not subject

Born in Ufa province in 1892, Sultan-Galiev had brief careers as a schoolteacher, librarian, and journalist, turning to revolutionary activities around 1913. In July 1917 he joined the Bolshevik party in Kazan, but maintained ties to many intellectuals and moderate socialists in the Muslim community.

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Sultan-Galiev played a major role in the establishment of Soviet power in Kazan and helped suppress an anti-Bolshevik Tatar nationalist revolt there in the first part of 1918. He was an early advocate of the ill-fated Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic, promulgated in March 1918 but never implemented, and of the Tatar Autonomous Republic founded in 1920 (today the Republic of Tatarstan). An able organizer and public speaker, Sultan-Galiev served the Soviet state during the civil war as chairman of the Central Muslim Military Collegium, chairman of the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of Peoples of the East, and member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Nationality Affairs. This last position made him the highest-ranking member of a Muslim nationality in Soviet Russia. Sultan-Galiev’s numerous newspaper articles and speeches outlined a messianic role for Russia’s Muslim peoples, who would bring socialist revolution to the subject peoples of Asia and help them overthrow the chains of European empires. Chief theorist of the so-called right wing among the Tatar intelligentsia, he hoped to reconcile communism with nationalism. Although personally an atheist, he advocated a cautious approach toward anti-religious propaganda among Russia’s Muslim population. These views cause some emigré and foreign scholars to characterize Sultan-Galiev as a prophet of the national liberation struggle against colonial rule. By the end of 1922 Sultan-Galiev had come into direct conflict with Josef Stalin’s nationality policy, which he openly attacked in party meetings. He was particularly concerned with two issues, (1) plans for the new federal government (USSR), which would disadvantage Tatars and other Muslim groups that were not granted union republic status, and (2) the persistence of Russian chauvinism and of a dominant Russian role in governing Muslim republics. In an effort to silence this criticism, officials acting on Stalin’s initiative arrested Sultan-Galiev in May 1923 and charged him with conspiring to undermine Soviet nationality policy and with illegally contacting Basmachi rebels. Although Sultan-Galiev was soon released—stripped of his party membership and all positions—a major conference on the nationality question in June 1923 emphasized that Stalin’s policies in this area were not to be challenged. By the end of the 1920s, Sultan-Galievism (sultangalievshchina) had become a common charge leveled against Tatars and other Muslims and was later deployed widely during the purges. SultanGaliev was rearrested in 1928 and tried with seventy-six others as part of a “Sultan-Galievist


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counterrevolutionary organization” in 1930. His death penalty was soon commuted, and he was released in 1934 and permitted to live in Saratov province. However, his third arrest in 1937 was followed by execution in January 1940. The case of Sultan-Galiev was reviewed by the Central Committee in 1990, leading to his complete rehabilitation and emergence as a new and old national hero in post-Soviet Tatarstan.

See also: ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT OF NATIONALITIES; TATARSTAN AND TATARS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennigsen, Alexandre A., and Wimbush, S. Enders. (1979). Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DANIEL E. SCHAFER

SUMAROKOV, ALEXANDER PETROVICH (1717–1777), playwright and poet. Ranked with Racine and Voltaire during his day, Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov was a founder of modern Russian literature, and arguably one of Russia’s first professional writers. Together with Mikhail Lomonosov and Vasily Tredyakovsky, Sumarokov helped introduce syllabotonic versification, created norms for the new literary language, and established many literary genres and tastes of the day. Sumarokov created the first Russian tragedies, comedies, operas, ballet, and model poetic genres including the fable, romance, sonnet, and others. He established the national theater in 1756, with the help of Fyodor Volkov’s Yaroslav troupe (it became a court theater in 1759, and lay the foundation for the Imperial Theaters). Sumarokov published the first private literary journal, Trudolyubivaya pchela (The Industrious Bee, 1759), inspiration for the “satirical journals” of the late 1760s and 1770s. An early supporter of Catherine II, after her ascension to power (or coup) he was given the right to publish at her expense, of which he made prolific use. Despite poetic admonitions to fellow noblemen to treat their serfs humanely, when Catherine asked his opinion of freeing the serfs at the time of the Nakaz, Sumarokov was dismissive. Gukovsky (1936) and others have tried to link Sumarokov to a so-called noble “fonde” and to

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the “Panin party,” not altogether convincingly. Sumarokov’s reputation went into total eclipse in the nineteenth century, when the literary movement he spearheaded was declared merely “pseudoClassicism.” It was not until the Soviet period that his achievement began to be reevaluated.

See also: CATHERINE II; LOMONOSOV, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH; THEATER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Levitt, Marcus C. (1995). “Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 150: 370–381. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman and Gale Research. MARCUS C. LEVITT

SUPREME SOVIET The Supreme Soviet was described in the 1936 and 1977 constitutions as the “highest organ of State power.” In the USSR, the bicameral Supreme Soviet was the chief, central legislative organ of the Soviet state. The constitutions of 1936 and 1977 followed closely the wording of the two preceding constitutions of 1918 and 1924 in describing the powers and functions of this body (earlier known as the Congress of Soviets) and its executive Presidium. As in preceding years, the deputies to the Supreme Soviet, elected to four-year terms throughout the republics, regions, provinces and other political-administrative subdivisions of authority throughout the USSR, were said to represent the interests of the workers, peasants, soldiers, and intellectuals. That the deputies would faithfully serve those interests, it was claimed in documents explaining the workings of the central legislature, was guaranteed by fact that the Communist Party at all levels played the determining role in selecting the single-list candidates for election to the legislative body. By the 1936 and 1977 constitutions, non-Party deputies could run for election and be elected. These deputies, too, were carefully vetted by the Party “aktivs.” Polling places for election of deputies seldom provided voting booths.

based on national, or ethnic, territorial units. The rationale given for this in official documents was that in this way the Soviet people would be represented both by geographic location as well as by ethnicity. Representation was based on one deputy per every 300,000 of the population. There was no class restriction as found in the first, 1918, constitution. The numbers of deputies in each body tended to increase over the years. This reflected the growth in population. No officially recognized cap was put on the total number of deputies, yet a limit nevertheless seemed to be in effect. The Soviet authorities apparently preferred to keep both bodies at approximately equal and manageable size. In that sense, the Communist Party leadership exercised control over the size of the legislative bodies as well as the texts of the bills submitted to it for enactment—always enacted unanimously by a show of hands. From 1937 to the 1960s, the Soviet of the Union increased from 569 to 791 deputies. The members of the second, or lower, chamber during the same period climbed from 574 to 750. The increase in the latter came from the addition of several new Union Republics to the USSR. These were the result of territorial annexations made before and during World War II. Both chambers met either separately or in joint session in the Supreme Soviet building within the Kremlin. They would meet jointly especially when the powerful executive Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was elected (every four years) along with elections of the USSR Supreme Court and of the Council of Ministers (formerly, Council of People’s Commissars), or government and cabinet. The chairman of the Presidium was considered to be, as head of state, the Soviet President. By the constitution the chambers were to meet twice per year in which the closely regulated sessions lasted only about a week. Prior to the 1950s, the two Soviets sometimes met more than twice per year.

The USSR Supreme Soviet was divided into two chambers, called the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities. The former was based on representation by geographic, political-administrative territorial units nationwide; the latter was

Besides effecting indirect Communist Party control over the legislative proceedings, each chamber of the Supreme Soviet established a Council of Elders. This body, though unmentioned in the constitution, served as a further conduit for Party control. Each council numbered approximately 150 elders. It consisted of leading figures from the republics, territories, and provinces. Besides proposing legislation, the councils supervised the formation of legislative committees, known as commissions,

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The Yakutsk delegation to the Supreme Soviet in 1938 included secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov, bottom left. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

within both houses. The committees oversaw affairs concerned with the State budget, legislation, the courts, foreign affairs, credentials, and so forth. The work of the committees was closely regulated. Often a leading member of the Communist Party Central Committee would chair a committee, such as that concerned with foreign affairs. Soviet propaganda aimed at a foreign audience boasted of the heterogeneous, democratic makeup of the USSR Supreme Soviet. One such document, Andrei Vyshinsky’s Law of the Soviet State (Gosudarstvo i pravo), noted that in the 1930s and 1940s. the Soviet legislature had a far greater proportion of women deputies than Western parliaments or the U.S. Congress. The alleged working-class backgrounds of the deputies was also touted. Party representation in the legislature stood at around 18 percent, or several times that of the percentage of Party members within the population at large. Government officials were said to constitute some 15 percent of the deputies. Soviet juristic writings explicitly denied that the Soviet Union’s political system recognized the


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Western principle of the separation of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial organs. Instead, it was claimed, the Soviet political system stressed the merging of executive, legislative, and judicial functions that was further afforded by the system’s centralized structure. Such unity was further enhanced by the parallel Communist Party hierarchy that was likewise structured to emphasize unity of function at all levels of administration and political authority. When the time came for voiced criticism of the system—beginning to surface within the illegal reform movement, or samizdat, of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—the dissidents, some of whom were put on trial and served sentences in the labor camps, called in some instances for retaining the basic structure of the soviets. Yet they demanded radical overhaul of the functions of the soviets at all levels of authority as well as elimination of exclusive Communist Party supervision of soviet elections and legislative deliberations. Some reformers called for incorporation of the principle of separation of powers.

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See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; CONGRESS OF PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES; CONSTITUTION OF 1936; CONSTITUTION OF 1977; DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; PRESIDIUM OF SUPREME SOVIET; STATE COMMITTEES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reshetar, John Stephen, Jr. (1978). The Soviet Polity Government and Politics in the USSR, 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row. Towster, Julian. (1948). Political Power in the U.S.S.R., 1917–1947: The Theory and Structure of Government in the Soviet State. New York: Oxford University Press. Vyshinsky, Andrei Y. (1979). The Law of the Soviet State. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ALBERT L. WEEKS

SUSLOV, MIKHAIL ANDREYEVICH (1902–1982), high-ranking Communist Party leader. Mikhail Suslov was a member of the Politburo from 1955 to 1982 and headed the agitation and propaganda department of the Central Committee from 1947 to 1982. An ideologist of the Stalinist school, Suslov was a reactionary and doctrinaire defender of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Like many in his generation of party leaders, Suslov had humble origins. He was born into a peasant family in 1902 in the village of Shakhovskoye, within presentday Saratov oblast. From 1918 to 1920 he served as assistant secretary of the Committee of Poor Peasants (Kombed) and organized a Komsomol branch in his village. In 1921 he joined the Communist Party and enrolled in a school for workers in Moscow. He went on to study economics at the Institute of Red Professors and the Plekhanov Economics Institute before entering the party-state apparatus in 1931. Suslov was a ruthless player in the party purges of the Josef Stalin era and rose through the ranks by moving into positions opened up by mass arrests. In 1937 he became a Rostov oblast party committee secretary. Two years later he headed the Stavropol regional party committee, a position he held until 1944. In 1944, as chairman of the Central Committee’s bureau for Lithuanian affairs, he supervised the incorporation of Lithuania into the USSR and the subsequent deportation of thousands of people.

Mikhail Suslov, shown here in 1956, headed the Communist Party’s agitation and propaganda department from 1946 until his death in 1982. © BETTMANN/CORBIS

In 1947 Suslov became a secretary of the Central Committee in charge of shaping, protecting, and enforcing official ideology. He also held au-

thoritative positions in foreign affairs and was noted for his demand for strict adherence to Soviet foreign policy by foreign communist parties. In 1949, at a Cominform meeting in Budapest, he denounced the Yugoslav Communist Party for its independent stance and in 1956 went to Hungary with Anastas Mikoyan and Marshal Grigory Zhukov to supervise the suppression of the Hungarian uprising. Suslov was a shrewd political operator who served three Soviet leaders: Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev. Very different from Khrushchev in temperament and outlook, he opposed de-Stalinization and economic reform, but supported him in 1957 against the antiparty group. In 1964, however, he turned on his former boss and was instrumental in the removal of Khrushchev and the installation of Brezhnev as first secretary of the Communist Party. Eschewing the limelight, Suslov did not seek the highest party or state positions for himself, but was content to remain chief party theoretician and ideologist.

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Deeply conservative, Suslov oversaw the official press and personally scrutinized publications to ensure conformity. According to Fedor Burlatsky (1988), he would also comment on everything written by members of the Central Committee departments. In 1969 he directed the dismissal of the progressive Novy mir editorial board. A hardline supporter of communism, he disliked the company of Westerners. At one Kremlin reception he placed tables between himself and foreign diplomats. Known as the “sea-green incorruptible of the Soviet establishment,” Suslov protested against increasing corruption in the party. In 1982 he died from a stroke that reportedly followed a heated discussion with an individual who was trying to cover up Brezhnev family scandals.

See also:

AGITPROP; CENTRAL COMMITTEE; COMMITTEES

OF THE VILLAGE POOR; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burlatsky, Fedor. (1988). Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, tr. Daphne Skillen. New York: Scribners. McCauley, Martin. (1997). Who’s Who in Russia since 1900. London: Routledge. Tatu, Michel (1968). Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin, tr. Helen Katel. New York: Viking. ELAINE MACKINNON

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portunities provided by a relaxation of tsarist censorship in 1865, the demands of an increasingly literate population, the mass production made possible by the new printing technology, and fast reporting of news by means of the telegraph. As a seasoned literary critic and aspiring playwright, Suvorin in 1895 started his own theatrical company and installed it in his own theater. He wrote the revealingly personal Diary of A. S. Suvorin (1923), an account of the literary and political life of his time never translated into English. Suvorin recognized the literary promise of Anton Chekhov when he first published stories in small Russian publications. During their thirteenyear collaboration from 1886 to 1899, Chekhov published major stories and plays with Suvorin. The two became close friends, and that bond eased for Suvorin the tragedies of his own family life. Both his first wife and a son committed suicide, while another son and a daughter died of illnesses.

See also:

CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH; JOURNALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ambler, Effie. (1972). Russian Journalism and Politics: The Career of Aleksei S. Suvorin, 1861–1881. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bartol, R. (1974). “Aleksei Suvorin: Russia’s Millionaire Publisher.” Journalism Quarterly 51:411–417. CHARLES A. RUUD

SUVORIN, ALEXEI SERGEYEVICH (1834–1912), publisher, editor, critic, playwright. Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin was born into a provincial military family and, by becoming a journalist, made his greatest contribution to Russia as publisher and editor of its most influential pre-Revolution conservative daily newspaper, New Times, and as publisher of Chekhov. First commissioned in the military, Suvorin resigned at age nineteen to concentrate on teaching, journalism, and literature. After working for several Russian newspapers and periodicals over the next fifteen years, he and a partner acquired the faltering St. Petersburg daily, New Times, in 1867. It became the flagship of a financially successful business that came to include book publishing, sales in company bookstores and railway station kiosks, and a school for printers. Suvorin grasped the op-


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SUVOROV, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH (1730–1800), generalissimo (1799), prince, field marshal, and count. Perhaps the greatest Russian military leader of all time, Alexander Suvorov never lost a battle. He is generally credited among the founders of the Russian school of military art. Suvorov entered service in 1748 and first saw conventional combat during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). As a regimental commander from 1763 to 1769, he devised a regulation that became a model for combat training and service practices. As a brigadier and major general from 1768 to 1772 he was instrumental in defeating the Polish Confederation of Bar. During Catherine II’s First Turkish War (1768–1774)

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he won ringing victories at Turtukai and Kozludji (both 1773). Suvorov subsequently (1776–1779, 1782–1784) campaigned in the Crimea and the Kuban, where he imposed greater Russian control and where he refined unconventional tactics appropriate to circumstance and enemy. During Catherine’s Second Turkish War (1787–1792), he defended Kinburn (1787), fought at Ochakov (1788), won battles of near-annihilation at Fokshani and Rymnik (1789), and successfully stormed Izmail (1790). After service against the Swedes in 1791, he returned to the southwest, where in 1794 and 1795 he subjugated rebellious Polish patriots. Though briefly banished under Paul I (1796– 1801), Suvorov served in the war of the Second Coalition against revolutionary France. In Italy during 1799, he led Austro-Russian armies to dazzling victories on the Adda and the Trebbia and at Novi. After disagreement with the Austrians, Suvorov in September 1799 successfully extricated Russian forces from northern Italy over the Swiss Alps in a campaign that probably exceeded the achievements of Hannibal two millennia before. Suvorov left three important legacies to his military heirs. First, he insisted on progressive, realistic training tailored to the characteristics of the peasant soldier. Second, he left in his Art of Victory (1795–1796) a set of prescriptions for battlefield success. He saw the primary objective in war as the enemy’s main force. He counseled commanders in pursuit of victory to observe his triad of “speed, assessment, and attack.” Speed was all-important: “One minute decides the outcome of battle, one hour the success of a campaign, one day the fate of empires . . . I operate not by hours but by minutes” (Menning, 1986, pp. 82–83). Third, Suvorov’s record in the field inspired emulation from subsequent generations of Russian military officers. However, many would-be inheritors forgot his admonitions about flexibility, and sought slavish imitation rather than flexible adaptation.

See also:

MILITARY ART; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; RUSSOTURKISH WARS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Longworth, Philip. (1965). The Art of Victory. The Life and Achievements of Field-Marshal Suvorov, 1729–1800. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Menning, Bruce W. (1986). “Train Hard, Fight Easy: The Legacy of A. V. Suvorov and His ‘Art of Victory.’” Air University Review 38(1):79–88. BRUCE W. MENNING

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SVANS Svans call themselves Mushwän (plural Shwanär). Nominally Georgian Orthodox, they preserve many pagan beliefs and practices. They inhabit a high mountainous area in northwestern Georgia beneath the main Caucasus chain, in the upper reaches of the rivers Ingur (Upper Svanetia) and Tskhenis-Tsqali (Lower Svanetia). Svan was first to split from the Common Kartvelian that also produced Georgian, Mingrelian, and Laz. The four main (and divergent) dialects are: Upper and Lower Bal (Upper Svanetia); and Lent’ekh and Lashkh (Lower Svanetia), although linguistic particularities characterize virtually each hamlet. The language is not taught, and all Svans educated in Svanetia since the introduction of universal schooling by the early Soviets have received instruction in Georgian. The largely mono-ethnic population of Svanetia is usually estimated at 50,000, although the disastrous winter of 1986–1987 caused many to abandon the region, especially Upper Svanetia. In the 1926 Soviet census, 13,218 declared Svan nationality, although thereafter all Kartvelian speakers became classified as Georgians. Annual heavy snowfalls meant that Svans were historically excluded from the outside world for months, penned up with their livestock inside appropriately compartmentalized stone dwellings, alongside which stood the unique, twelfth-century, square towers for which Svanetia, especially Upper Svanetia, is famous. While rich in forests and minerals, the limited arable areas produce little apart from grass and hay, potatoes, and barley, the source of the local hard liquor (haräq’). Goiters were frequent through iodine deficiency; the difficulties associated with providing another staple were depicted in the silent film Salt for Svanetia. Ibex, chamois, and bears have long been hunted. Svan men often served as migrant laborers in Mingrelia during the winter months. During the early nineteenth century, Lower Svanetia became part of Dadiani’s Mingrelia. In 1833 the Dadishkelian princes of western Upper Svanetia accepted Russian protection, governing their own affairs until the princedom was abolished in 1857. The eastern part of Upper Svanetia acknowledged no overlord, thus becoming known as “Free Svanetia.” Later in the century, Russia took control of the area through military action, completely destroying the village of Khalde, as described in a moving short story by Sergo Kldiashvili.

See also:

CAUCASUS; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; MINGRELIANS


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See also:

Freshfield, Douglas. (1896). The Exploration of the Caucasus. 2 vols. London: E. Arnold.

I

MILITARY ART; MILITARY DOCTRINE; MILITARY,

SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; TUKHACHEVSKY, MIKHAIL NIKOLAYEVICH

Hewitt, George. (1996). A Georgian Reader: with Texts, Translation, and Vocabulary. London: SOAS.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Palmaitis, Letas, and Gudjedjiani, Chato. (1985). SvanEnglish Dictionary. New York: Caravan Books.

Naveh, Shimon. (1997). In Pursuit of Military Excellence. London: Frank Cass.

Phillipps-Wolley, Sir Clive. (1883). Savage Svanetia. 2 vols. London: R. Bentley and Son.

Schneider, James J. (1994). The Structure of Strategic Revolution: Total War and the Roots of the Soviet Warfare State. Novato, CA: Presidio.

B. GEORGE HEWITT

Svechin, A. A. (1992). Strategy, ed. Kent D. Lee; introductory essays by Andrei A. Kokoshin, et. al. Minneapolis, MN: East View Publications. JAMES J. SCHNEIDER

SVECHIN, ALEXANDER ANDREYEVICH (1878–1938), military theorist and intellectual. Alexander Svechin was one of the key intellectual leaders of the Red Army during the golden age of Soviet military theory (1918–1937). Svechin, an artilleryman, was a crucial figure in establishing a new and revolutionary understanding of modern war. Drawing on military thinkers of the nineteenth and late eighteenth century and his own intense study of the imperial Russian military experience, Svechin reformulated the meaning of the term strategy. Classically, strategy meant the art of conducting military campaigns. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, war became thoroughly mechanized and industrialized—and total. Svechin was one the earliest theorists to recognize that the material and creative challenges of total war would revolutionize the very concept of strategy. Svechin published his views in print under the title Strategy. The work was published in two editions in 1926 and 1927. Here he defined strategy as “the art of combining preparations for war and the grouping of operations for achieving the goal for the armed forces set by the war.” Through much of his professional career Svechin carried on a lengthy debate with another important Soviet theorist, Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky. Svechin’s work in Strategy and elsewhere informed his view that modern war would be characterized by attrition (izmor). Tukhachevsky argued a contrary view, that with the help of technology, states could still fight swift decisive wars of annihilation (sokrushenie). In the end, history decided the argument in Svechin’s favor. A prolific writer, Svechin was also a brilliant teacher who educated a generation of Soviet military leaders who helped win World War II. He was executed as an enemy of the state on July 29, 1938.


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SVYATOPOLK I (c. 980–1019), grand prince of Kiev, replacing Vladimir Svyatoslavich, the Christianizer of Rus. The identity of Svyatopolk’s father is uncertain. Around 980, after Vladimir had his halfbrother Yaropolk killed, he slept with Yaropolk’s Greek wife, a former nun, and she gave birth to Svyatopolk. Because he was born of adultery, the chronicler explains, Svyatopolk (“the Cursed,” by which appellation he came to be known) was stigmatized for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, Vladimir treated him as his son. Before 988, it appears, he gave Svyatopolk the town of Turov. While there, Svyatopolk established friendly relations with the Poles and, around 1013, married the daughter of Boleslaw I and accepted Latin Christianity. Later he plotted with the Poles against Vladimir, and the latter imprisoned him. After Vladimir died in 1015, Svyatopolk, allegedly his eldest surviving son, bribed the Kievans to accept him as their prince, even though many preferred his halfbrother Boris, perhaps in keeping with Vladimir’s wish. Because Svyatopolk’s succession was challenged, he initiated a fierce campaign to eradicate his half-brothers, who posed a threat to his rule. Thus he had Boris, Gleb, and Svyatoslav killed. In 1016, however, Yaroslav of Novgorod and his Varangians defeated Svyatopolk and his Pechenegs near Lyubech. Svyatopolk fled to the Poles, where Boleslaw I joined him; together they evicted Yaroslav from Kiev in July 1018. In 1019, after the king departed, Yaroslav attacked Svyatopolk and defeated him. As Svyatopolk fled, his reason and strength failed him, and he died somewhere between the Polish and the Czech lands.

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I I

GRAND PRINCE; KIEVAN RUS; VLADIMIR, ST.;

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dimnik, Martin. (1994). The Dynasty of Chernigov, 1054–1146. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MARTIN DIMNIK

Dimnik, Martin. (1996). “Succession and Inheritance in Rus’ before 1054.” Mediaeval Studies 58:87–117. Franklin, Simon, and Shepard, Jonathan. (1996). The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman. MARTIN DIMNIK

SVYATOPOLK II (1050–1113), prince of Polotsk, Novgorod, and his patrimony of Turov, and grand prince of Kiev. Svyatopolk, son of Izyaslav and grandson of Yaroslav Vladimirovich (the Wise), became grand prince in 1093 after the death of his uncle Vsevolod. He and his cousin Vladimir Vsevolodovich (Monomakh) of Pereyaslavl sought to unite the princes of Rus against the nomads, but their cousin Oleg Svyatoslavich of Chernigov refused to cooperate. In response, they evicted Oleg from Chernigov and, in 1097, forced him to accept their terms at a congress of princes at Lyubech. They all pledged loyalty to each other and agreed that each one would retain the patrimony of his father. Soon after, Svyatopolk broke his pledge by ordering the blinding of Vasilko Rostislavich of Terebovl, whom David Igorevich falsely accused of plotting against Svyatopolk. When Monomakh and Oleg waged war against Svyatopolk, he promised to punish David, but instead attempted to seize Galician towns from Vasilko and his brother. When the latter cut off the wheat and salt supply to Kiev, Svyatopolk confiscated salt from the Caves Monastery and sold it at inflated prices. In 1100, at Vitichev (Uvetichi), he concluded peace with Monomakh and Oleg, and punished David by appropriating his patrimony of Vladimir in Volyn. After that, he and his cousins campaigned against the Polovtsy in 1103, 1107, and 1111. Their resounding victories forced the nomads to stop their incursions for over a decade. Svyatopolk died on April 16, 1113, and was buried in the Church of St. Mikhail in Kiev, which he had built.

See also: CAVES MONASTERY; GRAND PRINCE; KIEVAN RUS;

SVYATOSLAV I (c. 942–972), son of Igor and Olga; nominal grand prince of Kiev. Svyatoslav I Igorevich became the nominal grand prince of Kiev in 945, after his father Igor’s death. He expanded Kievan Rus to its furthest limits, but overreached himself and failed to consolidate his rule. Svyatoslav was the first prince with a Slavic name, but he remained a Varangian at heart and refused to adopt Christianity. According to the Primary Chronicle, he assumed power between 956 and 964 when his mother, the regent, was deposed. Around 963 he attacked the Khazars on the lower Don and eventually destroyed their state and opened the steppe to other nomads. He also defeated the Vyatichi and the Volga Bulgars in the northeast, and the Yasians (Ossetians) and Kasogians (Cherkasses) in the Kuban region. His southeastern campaigns took him to the Caspian Sea. He thus secured control of all the trade routes between the Dnieper and the Volga. In 967 he captured northern Bulgaria and made Pereyaslavets his headquarters. The Pechenegs attacked Kiev in 968, forcing him to return home and drive them into the steppe. At that time he partitioned Rus between his sons: Yaropolk received Kiev, Oleg the Derevlyane, and Vladimir Novgorod. He then returned to Pereyaslavets, which he proposed to make his capital. He campaigned against the Greeks in Bulgaria and Thrace until 971, when Emperor John I Tzimisces forced him to accept humiliating peace terms. While Svyatoslav was returning to Kiev in 972, the Pechenegs attacked and killed him. They used his skull as a drinking cup.

See also:

KIEVAN RUS; PECHENEGS; PRIMARY CHRONICLE; RURIKID DYNASTY; VLADIMIR, ST.; YAROPOLK I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vernadsky, George. (1948). Kievan Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. MARTIN DIMNIK

NOVGOROD THE GREAT; VLADIMIR MONOMAKH

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SVYATOSLAV II (1027–1076), grand prince of Kiev and progenitor of the dynasties of Chernigov, Murom, and Ryazan. Before Svyatoslav’s father Yaroslav Vladimirovich the Wise died in 1054, he gave Svyatoslav Yaroslavich the patrimony of Chernigov, including Murom, Ryazan, and Tmutarakan. After his father’s death, Svyatoslav and his brothers Izyaslav and Vsevolod ruled as a triumvirate for some twenty years. They asserted their authority over all the other princes and defended Rus against the nomads, primarily the Polovtsy (Cumans). In 1068 Svyatoslav scored a great victory over the Polovtsy, after which he formed alliances with them. The following year the Kievans invited him to replace Izyaslav as prince, but he refused to depose his brother. Svyatoslav became the most powerful prince in the land. In addition to his patrimonial lands, he established his rule over the Beloozero region and Novgorod. In 1072, when the brothers translated the relics of Saints Boris and Gleb in Vyshgorod and issued the Law Code of Yaroslav’s Sons (Pravda Yaroslavichey), he expressed solidarity with Izyaslav for the last time. The following year he evicted Izyaslav from Kiev and therewith disobeyed his father’s directive to live at peace with his brothers. By doing so, however, he gave his heirs the right to rule Kiev after him. Four years later, in 1076, he died in Kiev. Svyatoslav was a patron of culture, learning, and the Church. He commissioned two miscellanies and founded monasteries in Chernigov and Kiev. He probably completed building the Cathedral of St. Savior in Chernigov where he was buried.

See also: IZYASLAV I; KIEVAN RUS; VSEVELOD I; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dimnik, Martin. (1994). The Dynasty of Chernigov, 1054–1146. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. MARTIN DIMNIK

SWEDEN, RELATIONS WITH The establishment, starting in the late eighth century, of a number of Swedish settlements in the eastern Baltic led to regular interaction with East-


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ern Slavs. Staraya Ladoga (Aldeigjuborg) became an important Scandinavian center on the southeastern shore of Lake Ladoga, but the Varangians gradually extended their operations southeastward along the Novgorod-Kiev axis. Many of them served in Gardariki (the “land of towns”) territory as dukes, merchants, and mercenaries and were collectively known as Rus (the basis for the word Russia). The local princes, starting with Rurik (Rörik) who became the ruler of Novgorod (Holmgard), had exclusively Scandinavian names. Even as the Scandinavian elite became Slavicized by the tenth century, a special relationship—in the form of dynastic marriages and joint military campaigns—continued into the early twelfth century. However, almost endemic conflict soon followed as Finland became a focus of the expansionist impulses of Sweden and the Grand Duchy of Novgorod alike. The Karelian tribes were baptized by Novgorod, whereas Swedish crusades into southwestern Finland began in the 1150s. By the late thirteenth century, the Swedes reached Karelia and established the fortress of Viborg (Vyborg in Russian), as well as Landskrona in the Neva estuary. The 1323 Treaty of Orekhovets/Nöteborg between the two rivals drew a border stretching across central Finland to the Viborg district, but did little to stall Swedish expansionism into northern Finland. A century and a half of relative calm was followed by renewed warfare in the late fifteenth century, but protracted peace negotiations with the newly independent Vasa Sweden and a growth of trade led to a gradual normalization of relations after the 1520s. The weakening of the Livonian Order created a power vacuum in the eastern Baltic and the basis for renewed conflict between Sweden and Muscovy. Gustav Vasa’s 1555 attack on Russia marked the beginning of Swedish aspirations for regional hegemony. The “Great Eastern Program” was designed to turn Sweden into a pan-Baltic power that could enrich itself by taxing the rapidly growing trade flows between Eastern and Western Europe. The Livonian War of 1533–1584 ultimately left Sweden in control of the northern coast of Estonia, while Muscovy gained temporary control of Narva, which became the country’s leading export port. The Teusina/Tiavzino peace (1595) formally recognized Swedish control of Finland. Sweden intervened during the Russian Time of Troubles, initially in support of the Moscow government but soon as a conqueror of the Novgorod region (in 1611–1612). Following the failure of

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efforts to place a Swedish candidate on the Russian throne, Gustav Adolf (Gustavus Adolphus) sought to force a union between Novgorod and Sweden and directed his expansionist attention at the Kola and White Sea coast, albeit unsuccessfully. The 1617 treaty of Stolbovo marked the peak of Swedish expansion into Russia, leaving the country in control of Ingria (Ingermanland; roughly today’s St. Petersburg region) and the Western half of Lake Ladoga. Novgorod was returned to Russia. Russian-Swedish relations were strong after the war, and the new Romanov rulers subsidized Swedish involvement in the Thirty Years’ War in 1630–1634, among other things. In spite of a steady expansion of trade, political ties deteriorated under Queen Christina. Russia renewed its attempts to gain access to the Baltic in the 1650s and attacked Sweden in 1658. In spite of some initial territorial gains, the Peace of Kardis in 1661 ratified the prewar status quo. The closing decades of the century saw a steady expansion in Russian trade via Swedish possessions, even in the face of periodic diplomatic disputes. Tsar Peter I (the Great) in the late 1690s managed to assemble an international alliance designed to challenge Swedish supremacy in the Baltic region. The Great Northern War of 1700–1721 led to the Swedish loss of its Baltic provinces and the establishment of Russian hegemony in the region. Russia in the eighteenth century took an active interest in Sweden’s internal affairs. Although Russian engagement on the Ottoman front led to alliance treaties with Sweden, Swedish revanchism triumphed at home, and a campaign against Russia from 1741 to 1743 sought to regain the lost eastern territories. The catastrophic war was followed by the loss of southeastern Finland to Russia. A defensive alliance was signed between the two countries, and the absolutist regime of Gustav(us) III in the 1770s sought Russian support for a Swedish conquest of Norway. A lack of success eventually led to another war against Russia from 1788 to 1790. The Peace of Värälä reaffimed the prewar status quo, while Gustav crowned his career by establishing an alliance with Russia. Sweden and Russia were allies against Napoleon until the French managed to use the Treaty of Tilsit to induce Alexander I to conquer Finland in the last Russo-Swedish war of 1808–1809 (Treaty of Fredrikshamn). Royal attempts to continue the war were made impossible by a bourgeois revolution in Sweden. The French Marshall Jean Baptiste Bernadotte (Karl Johan) was elected Swedish heir to the

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throne in 1810 in order to gain Napoleon’s support for the reconquest of Finland. However, he instead turned to France’s opponents in order to make possible a Swedish takeover of Norway. In 1812, Sweden declared itself neutral in European conflicts, but a secret alliance was signed with Russia. Popular Russophobia increased in the 1830s and 1840s, and Oskar I began to pursue closer ties with Great Britain and Denmark. A border dispute with Russia in the 1850s led Sweden to seek British-French guarantees. The two powers in 1856 forced Russia to demilitarize the Åland Islands. Anti-Russian sentiment was further boosted by the Polish uprisings and the Russification measures adopted in Finland toward the end of the century. In spite of this, the government defined its neutrality even more strictly in 1885. Nonetheless, Russia’s recognition of Norwegian independence in 1905 was caused by suspicions of pan-Nordic union and Sweden’s pro-German stance. The gradually more tense political relations did not prevent the establishment of growing economic and cultural ties. Russia accounted for 5 to 6 percent of Swedish imports in the late nineteenth century, but in the years leading up to the October Revolution, Russia was the third- or fourth-largest destination of Swedish exports. Swedish direct investment grew and, for instance, Nobel Industries developed a substantial presence in Russia. Sweden harbored many intellectual refugees from Russia. Sweden remained neutral in World War I, in spite of popular pressures for an alliance with Germany. The neutral position allowed Sweden, as the first Western power, to establish relations with the new Bolshevik regime. A Swedish-Soviet trade treaty was signed in the autumn of 1918, although formal diplomatic recognition only followed in 1924. Ties again deteriorated in the 1930s but, following the rise of fascism, Sweden backed Soviet membership in the League of Nations. In spite of an official position of neutrality during World War II, Sweden openly supported its neighbor during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1939–1940. A brief conflict with the Soviets in 1942 followed Soviet efforts to sink Swedish freight ships carrying German goods. Another source of tension came from the flight of many Balts (mainly Latvians and Estonians) to Sweden. While 160 Baltic military officers were returned to the USSR in 1945 and 1946, civilian refugees were permitted to stay in Sweden. The Soviets strongly opposed Swedish efforts to establish Nordic security cooperation after the


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war, and Sweden returned to its policy of nonalignment, albeit with secret cooperation with the West. Moscow valued Sweden’s decision not to acquire nuclear weapons, and the two countries often found themselves adopting similar positions regarding international disputes. Sweden gained further favor by staying out of the European Economic Community and by supporting the ESCE (European Coal and Steel Community) process. Growing tensions were caused by Afghanistan and sightings of Soviet submarines in Swedish waters, one of which was stranded in 1981. Ties were normalized under Gorbachev. Commercial relations were relatively modest during the Soviet and postSoviet period.

sovereign for life in the field army, in the garrisons, and in the lower levels of provincial administration. A few deti boyarskie owned some allodial land, but most depended primarily upon the sovereign’s bounty in service-conditional land and cash and grain issues to outfit themselves and their retainers for duty. The syn boyarsky’s bounty entitlements were determined in part by his service capacity as assessed at inspection and in part by his past service, past rank, and the services and ranks of his forebears. The average syn boyarsky owned no more than five or six peasant tenants. Upon retirement his son or another male kinsman usually received part or all of his service lands and took over his service obligations.

See also:

See also: BOYAR; MESTNICHESTVO; MUSCOVY; POMESTIE;

DENMARK, RELATIONS WITH; FOREIGN TRADE;

GREAT NORTHERN WAR; LIVONIAN WAR; NARVA,

STRELTSY

TREATY OF; NORWAY, RELATIONS WITH; NYSTADT, TREATY OF; STOLBOVO, TREATY OF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kirby, David. (1990). Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World, 1492–1772. London: Longman. Kirby, David. (1995). The Baltic World, 1772–1993: Europe’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. London: Longman. JARMO T. KOTILAINE

SYN BOYARSKY A ranking in the Muscovite state service system, held by provincial petty noble cavalrymen who comprised the bulk of the campaign army up to the middle of the seventeenth century. The syn boyarsky (pl. deti boyarskie) comprised Muscovy’s middle service class, below the metropolitan nobility but higher in status than the contractually recruited commoner cossacks and musketeers. Syn boyarsky literally means “boyar’s son,” reflecting this group’s mixed origins (younger sons of Moscow boyars, slave or free retainers of formerly independent appanage princes, sons of clergymen or peasants, etc.) in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The syn boyarsky was legally free in the sense that he was exempt from taxes, and he was entitled to own peasants and to sue in defense of his precedence honor. But he was required to serve the


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BRIAN DAVIES

SYTIN, IVAN DMITRIEVICH (1851–1934), Russia’s leading pre-Revolution publisher of books, magazines, and the top daily newspaper, Russian Word (Russkoye slovo). Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin, had literate but poor peasant parents and only two years of schooling in his native village of Gnezdnikovo, Kostroma Province. Venturing first to the Nizhny Novgorod Fair at fourteen as helper to a fur-trading uncle, he apprenticed at fifteen to a Moscow printer-merchant who helped him start a business in 1876, the year of his marriage to a cook’s daughter who would be vital to his success. Like his mentor, Sytin issued calendars, posters, and tales that itinerant peddlers sold to peasants throughout the countryside. When in 1884 Leo Tolstoy needed a publisher for his simple books (the Mediator series) meant to edify the same readership, his choice of Sytin raised this unknown to respected status among intellectuals. Sytin then began to publish for well-educated readers and branched into schoolbooks, children’s books, and encyclopedias by investing in the new mass-production German presses that cut per-unit costs. His rise as an entrepreneur who exploited the latest technol-

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ogy led contemporaries to tag him “American” in method. Sytin claimed that he became a newspaper publisher in 1894 at Anton Chekhov’s urging, and he hired able editors and journalists who made his Russian Word the most-read liberal daily in Russia. Lessening censorship and rapid industrialization in the last decades of the tsarist regime helped Sytin add to his publishing ventures and kept him a millionaire through the economic disruption of World War I. After the 1917 Revolution, Sytin received assurances from Vladimir Lenin that he could publish for the Bolshevik regime, only to be cast off as a capitalist after Lenin died in 1924. The final decade of his life was marked by gloom, austerity, and obscurity, offset only by his church attendance and his writing of memoirs (published in

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the USSR in 1960 in a shortened edition). His downtown Moscow apartment is today an exhibition center in his honor.

See also:

JOURNALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lindstrom, Thaïs. (1957). “From Chapbooks to Classics: The Story of Intermediary.” American Slavic and East European Review 16:190–201. Ruud, Charles A. (1990). Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851–1934. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press. Watstein, J. (1971). “Ivan Sytin—An Old Russian Success Story.” Russian Review 30:43–53. CHARLES A. RUUD


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TABLE OF RANKS The Table of Ranks [or rankings] of all official posts (Tabel’ o Rangakh Vsekh Chinov) divided government service into three vertical columns: military (voinskie), civil (statskie), and court (privdvornye). The military column was further subdivided into infantry, guards, artillery, and navy. These vertical columns were divided horizontally into ranks or classes (klassy), from rank fourteen up to rank one, each containing a variable number of posts or offices (chiny). The most crowded ranks were the civilian ones, with sometimes a dozen or more posts packed into each to accommodate newly created central and provincial officials, whereas each rank in the guards column contained just one post. Nineteen explanatory points accompanied the chart. Like many of Peter I’s modernizing reforms, the Table of Ranks rationalized changes that had already occurred piecemeal and replaced the old overlapping ranking systems inherited from the seventeenth century, which did not differentiate between civilian and military posts. It incorporated titles such as general, major, and colonel that had been in use in certain regiments since the 1630s, new offices such as chancellor and vice-chancellor, and court grades introduced after Peter’s marriage in 1712 for use in the new tsaritsa’s court. The 1722 edict also contained points from foreign ranking systems, especially from Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden. Peter himself edited the final version and incorporated suggestions from the Senate and governmental departments.

T

As the grid layout made plain, one of the purposes of the Table of Ranks was to correlate status across different branches of service. For example, chancellor in the civil service and field marshalgeneral in the army both held rank one. To occupy a position on the table at all was to be privileged, for the fourteen ranks related only to the officer class in the armed forces and its equivalent in the civil service. Noncommissioned officers, regular troops, and their civilian equivalents were not included. The table was strict about qualifications for jobs. Neither post nor rank could be inherited or bought. At the same time, birth and marriage continued to confer privilege. The first of the accompanying explanatory points confirmed the precedence of princes of the blood and royal sonsin-law. Point eight allowed sons of princes, counts, barons, and other aristocrats free access to places

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where the court assembled before others holding lowly office (chin), but the sovereign still wished to see them distinguish themselves from others in all cases according to their merit. Even the highest born would not be awarded any rank until they had served the tsar and the fatherland. Conversely, non-nobles who managed to enter the table received hereditary noble status upon attaining military rank fourteen or civilian rank eight. Civil offices in ranks nine to fourteen conferred personal noble status only. Women were ranked according to their husbands or fathers, depending on their marital status, apart from ladies-in-waiting, holding court service ranks in their own right. The Table of Ranks endorsed the belief that nobles were the natural leaders in a society of orders composed of categories with unequal rights. It did not demonstrate a consistent commitment to meritocracy to the detriment of lineage, nor did it specifically raise commoners at the expense of nobles. Nobles who failed to attain a post on the table did not lose their noble status. The Holstein envoy H. F. de Bassewitz writes: “What [Peter] had in mind was not the abasement of the noble estate. On the contrary, all tended towards instilling in the nobility a desire to distinguish themselves from common folk by merit as well as by birth.” The final explanatory point specified that people were to have clothing, carriages, and livery appropriate to their office and calling. Peter did not intend to diminish the traditional elite in principle, nor did he do so in practice. In 1730, of the 179 army and navy officers and officials in ranks one through four of the table, ninetenths were descended from old Muscovite noble clans and a third from men who recently had been boyars. Over the centuries, some posts on the table were abolished and others were created to accommodate the staff of academies, universities, and other new institutions. Orders and medals became associated with various grades. It became harder for non-nobles to enter the table. But the basic principles established by Peter I continued until 1917, and consciousness of rank and striving for promotion and honors left a deep imprint on Russian society and culture.

See also:

PETER I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Meehan-Waters, Brenda. (1982). Autocracy and Aristocracy. The Russian Service Elite of 1730. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. LINDSEY HUGHES

TAGANKA The Taganka emerged in 1964, under the leadership of Yuri Lyubimov, as one of the young theaters reflecting the generational split within the Soviet intelligentsia following the year of protest (1956). A theater of young comrades-in-arms, Taganka believed in its mission: making audiences aware of contemporary moral, political, and social dilemmas. Aesthetically, it revived Meyerhold’s tradition. A theater of synthesis, it mobilized various resources: music, dance, pantomime, acrobatics, masks, the shadow-play, and others. Many shows began outside and proceeded through the lobby into the auditorium. The Taganka opened with Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, putting into practice Brecht’s own theory of epic theatre. The Taganka’s approach to the repertoire was unique: it often produced prose adaptations (A Hero of Our Time, 1964; Master and Margarita, 1977); and poetic montage (Antiworlds, 1965; Listen! Mayakovsky!, 1967). Lyubimov’s Taganka, with its brilliant actors, such as Vladimir Vysotsky, Veniamin Smekhov, and Valery Zolotukhin, and no less brilliant designer, David Borovsky, quickly became a cultural landmark. Despite continuous battles with censorship, it was never closed down and was held out to the West to display artistic freedom in the USSR. However, Lyubimov lost his Soviet citizenship in 1984, while in London. The Theater’s new leader, Anatoly Efros, a follower of Konstantin Stanislavsky, took it in a different direction. Whereas Lyubimov had developed shows, Efros developed actors. Under perestroika, the Taganka lost its status as gadfly of the society. Lyubimov’s return in 1989 did little to reinstate the status. A split within the theater, initiated by N. Gubenko, dealt a serious blow to the Taganka and it never recovered the status that it held before 1984.

See also:

PERESTROIKA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Beumers, Birgit. (1997). Yury Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre 1964–1994. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

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Gershkovich, Alexander. (1989). The Theater of Yuri Lyubimov: Art and Politics at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow. New York: Paragon House. MAIA KIPP

TAJIKISTAN AND TAJIKS The Tajiks are the most prominent indigenous nonTurkic population in Central Asia. They are of Persian/Iranian ethnic descent, although their exact origin is subject to debate. Legends link the Tajiks with Alexander the Great and his campaign in the region north of Afghanistan and west of China— what is today Tajikistan. More likely, contemporary Tajiks are descendants of the Persian-speaking population that resided in the sedentary regions of what is now Central Asia, particularly in the country of Tajikistan. Tajikistan had a population of 6,719,567 in 2002, of which approximately 4,361,000 were ethnic Tajik (64.9%). However, if one adds to that the million or so Tajiks that live in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, respectively, the number increases to well above six million Tajiks in Central Asia. What makes these calculations difficult is the fact that defining oneself as a Tajik is a construct of the Soviet era. Prior to the early twentieth century, people in the region defined themselves more on tribal and clan affiliations or by their adherence to Islam than to an ethnic identity. In neighboring Uzbekistan, for example, ethnic Tajiks claim that they are actually more prominent than the official statistics of that country suggest. Within the Republic of Tajikistan, other significant minorities include Uzbeks (25.0%) and Russians (3.5%). Many Russians emigrated from Tajikistan immediately after the break-up of the Soviet Union, particularly during the period of the civil war (1992–1997). Most of the Uzbeks live in the northern region of Sogd, previously known as Leninobod (Leninabad). The remaining Russians live in the capital city of Dushanbe, which in 2002 had an overall population of 590,000, although that figure undoubtedly was an underestimation. The Tajiks speak an eastern dialect of Farsi, the language of Iran. The languages are mutually intelligible; although as modern Tajik is written in the Cyrillic script and not in the Arabic script, there can be difficulties between the two. Indeed, throughout the past century, Tajik has been writ-


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An elderly Tajik man drinks tea as another plays a traditional musical instrument at a Dushanbe street market. © AFP/CORBIS

ten in Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic scripts. It is the intention of the current government to return to the Arabic script, although the practical difficulties of such a move have slowed any such effort. In contrast to the Iranians, the Tajiks are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi School, not Shi’a Muslims like Iranians. This is the result of the history of religious centers in the region, such as Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, where a number of ethnic Tajiks live. More importantly, the Safavid dynasty that made Shi’a Islam the official religion of Persia did not control the traditional Tajik territories. There is a small sect of Isma’ili Shi’a in the Badakhshon area of eastern Tajikistan that is loyal to the spiritual leader of the Aga Khan. In addition, the non-Tajiks in the country practice a range of religions. Tajiks point to the Sassanid dynasty of the early tenth century as a founding moment in their history. Traditionally, the Tajiks—or Tajik speakers— occupied urban areas of Central Asia, especially the key trading cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

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Indeed, many were the economic and political elite of the Bukharan Emirate, which was prominent in the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The Emirate eventually became a Protectorate of the Russian Empire in the 1870s and until 1917 was closely associated with the tsarist regime. After the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, which brought about the Uzbek S.S.R., the Tajik Autonomous S.S.R was established. On October 5, 1929, the Soviet government officially declared it a full-fledged Union Republic. At 143,000 square kilometers, Tajikistan is one of the smaller countries in the region. It is largely mountainous, with the Pamirs dominating the eastern part of the coun-

try (the region known as the Badakhshon Autonomous Region).

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Within a year of independence from the USSR, the Tajik government collapsed due to infighting among rival groups and a five-year civil war ensued (1992–1997). The war was largely seen as a struggle between regional rivals. In 1997, the opposing sides agreed to form a National Reconciliation Committee (NRC) that set the stage for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. President Imomali Rakhmonov successfully consolidated his authority in the postwar era and in the early twenty-first century has a firm control of the coun-

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try, which continues to be dominated by regional and clan rivalries. Tajikistan is an overwhelmingly mountainous country that has few natural resources other than mineral wealth. Tajikistan was the source of strategic minerals for the Soviet nuclear program and continues to be a supplier of other minerals for export. In particular, aluminum is deemed important and is the foundation for one of the region’s largest aluminum processing plants in Tursun-Zade. There are modest oil and gas deposits, but these are used exclusively for domestic consumption. Cotton is also a product traditionally exported. Because of the civil war, economic development in the country has been abysmally low. It is estimated that the production levels of the country are less than half of the 1991 figures. Since 2001, international financial institutions have increased their commitments to Tajikistan to begin the process of rebuilding the economy. Of particular interest are the possibilities in hydroelectric energy and continued development of mineral reserves. The total gross national product (GNP) for 2001 was $7.5 billion, giving an estimated purchasing power parity (PPP) at $1,140 per capita. Per capita income is actually less than $600, with many earning as little as $10 per month in actual salary. Because it is a landlocked country that requires open access to outside trade routes, Tajikistan is dependent upon building strong relations with its neighbors—China, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic. Of particular importance is the fact that Tajiks are prominent in neighboring Uzbekistan, especially in the historic cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. Another key issue for Tajikistan is the fact that Iran feels some affinity toward the country. Iran played a key role in facilitating the peace talks in the mid-1990s and, at least at that time, felt it could be a more significant player in the country. Finally, Tajik support of the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan has paid modest returns. There is currently a small U.S.-base facility in Dushanbe and strategic assistance from the United States to Tajikistan has increased substantially. Tajikistan is now part of the NATO Partnership for Peace program. The Tajik government hopes that these increased external relations will eventually translate into increased economic assistance. In turn, this aid will help stabilize a very precarious domestic situation.


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See also:

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A V R A A M Y

P A L I T S Y N

ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NA-

TIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abdullaev, Kamoludin and Barnes, Catherine, eds. (2001). Politics of Compromise: The Tajikistan Peace Process, Accord No. 10. London: Conciliation Resources. Akiner, Shirin. (2002). Tajikistan: Disintegration or Reconciliation? London: Royal Institute of International Affairs. Allworth, Edward, ed. (1994). Central Asia: 130 Years of Russia Dominance, A Historical Overview. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Atkin, Muriel. (1989). The Subtlest Battle: Islam in Soviet Tajikistan. Philadelphia: The Foreign Policy Research Institute. Atkin, Muriel. (1997). “Thwarted Democratization in Tajikistan.” In Conflict, Cleavage, and Change in Central Asia and the Caucasus, ed. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bennigsen, Alexandre and Wimbush, S. Enders. (1985). Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide. London: C. Hurst. Cummings, Sally, ed. (2002). Power and Change in Central Asia. London: Routledge. Rakowska–Harmstone, Teresa. (1970). Russia and Nationalism in Central Asia: The Case of Tadzhikistan. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. ROGER KANGAS

TALE OF AVRAAMY PALITSYN The Tale of Avraamy Palitsyn is one of the earliest, most popular and widely diffused (over 200 manuscript copies are known to exist) narratives about the Time of Troubles. Although the author was a monk, he took part in many important events of the period such as the negotiations with the Poles in 1610. He used eyewitness accounts and official documentation to compose the tale some time around 1617. The first six chapters, which some scholars attribute to another author, narrate the onset of the Troubles from the time of Ivan IV to the reign of Vasily I. Shuisky. The core of the tale (in chapters seven through fifty-two) is comprised of an epic, eyewitness description of the siege of the Trinity St. Sergius monastery between 1608–1610 by Polish forces. The last chapters are

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devoted to the liberation of Moscow, the process of electing Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov, and the end of the conflict with the Poles. The text emphasizes the important role played by the Trinity monastery in stopping the Polish advance and organizing resistance. Avraamy also stresses the role he played in inspiring the liberation movement and assisting it with his deeds and prayers. The tale exists in several versions, but scholars disagree over the extent to which variations represent authorial interventions. Like other works of the period, the tale displays both stylistic and structural innovations. It has long been appreciated by scholars for its range of linguistic registers, use of direct speech, rhythmic prose, and rhetorical skill.

See also:

IVAN IV; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH;

SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH; TIME OF TROUBLES; TRINITY ST. SERGIUS MONASTERY

BRIAN BOECK

a new German command team of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff time to develop plans already outlined by staff officers on the ground— to concentrate their entire force against the Second Army. After five days of hard fighting, between August 26 and August 30, there were 50,000 Russian casualties, and 90,000 prisoners. Samsonov committed suicide and the Germans turned on Rennenkampf, driving the First Army back over the frontier between September 7 and 14, in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes. The Russians came closer to victory in East Prussia than is generally realized. Their failure was primarily a consequence of attempting a campaign of maneuver arguably beyond the capacity of any army under the tactical conditions of 1914. But while the losses in men and material were replaced, the blow Tannenberg inflicted on Russian national morale was never restored throughout the war.

See also:

TAMBOV UPRISING See

WORLD WAR I

ANTONOV UPRISING. BIBLIOGRAPHY

TANNENBERG, BATTLE OF The Battle of Tannenberg, in August 1914, was the consequence of Russia’s commitment to an immediate offensive during World War I. On the grand strategic level, the tsarist empire’s major problem involved making sure its major continental ally, France, was not forced out of the war before Russia could bring its full strength to bear. That in turn justified taking strategic risks. The principal question was whether the attack should concentrate on Germany or Austria, and the Russian army seemed to have ample strength to pursue both options. Russia’s war plan against Germany involved sending two armies against the exposed province of East Prussia, defended by what seemed little more than a token force. The First Army, under General Pavel Rennenkampf, advanced west across the Niemen River; the Second Army, under General Alexander Samsonov, moved northwest from Russian Poland. Both initially achieved local successes against indecisive opposition. The Russian commanders, however, failed to coordinate their movements and to press their advantage. Poor logistics and intelligence further slowed the advance, particularly in the Second Army’s sector. That gave

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Golovine, N. N. (1934). The Russian Campaign of 1914, tr. A. G. S. Muntz. Ft. Leavenworth, KS: The Command and General Staff School Press. Showalter, Dennis. (1991). Tannenberg: Clash of Empires. Hamden, CT: Archon. DENNIS SHOWALTER

TARKOVSKY, ANDREI ARSENIEVICH (1932–1986), Russian film director. Tarkovsky was born in the village of Zavrazhye on the Volga river in the Ivanovo province, northeast of Moscow. His father, Arseny Alexandrovich (1907–1989), was a poet, at that time working as a translator before achieving acclaim in later years. His mother, Maria Ivanovna (Vishnyakova), had studied with Arseny at the Moscow Institute for Literature but was working as a proofreader for First State Publishing House in Moscow. Soon after the family moved to Moscow in 1935, Tarkovsky’s parents separated and later divorced. Tarkovsky remained with his mother and sister, but his father continued to play an important role in his intellectual and emotional development. Tarkovsky started school in Moscow in 1939, but after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was


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evacuated in 1941 to relatives in the town of Yuryevets, near his birthplace. In 1951 Tarkovsky entered the Institute for Oriental Studies but soon abandoned his academic life. In 1953 he joined a geological expedition to Siberia. On returning, he enrolled the following year at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, where he studied under the supervision of the renowned Soviet director Mikhail Romm. Fellow students included Andrei Konchalovsky, who also later achieved international fame as a director, and Vadim Yusev, who worked as director of photography on several of Tarkovsky’s early films. In 1957 Tarkovsky married classmate Irma Rausch. In 1960 he graduated from film school with honors. For his diploma work, he wrote and directed a fifty-minute feature film called The Steamroller and the Violin, which treats several themes— childhood, innocence and loss, male friendship, and the redemptive power of art—which later become central to his work. In 1961 Tarkovsky started work on a Mosfilm commission, released the following year under the title Ivan’s Childhood. This film, which explores the relationship between a young boy and two adult soldiers experiencing the physical and psychological dislocations of war, immediately won international acclaim. Tarkovsky’s next film, Andrei Rublev, is considered by many to be his masterpiece. This long, complex account of the life of the early fifteenth-century Russian icon painter took five years to complete (1961–1966) and, because of its unconventional treatment of national history, its vivid depiction of medieval cruelties, and its central concern with the relationship between spirituality and artistic creation, encountered the hostility of the Soviet authorities, who delayed its release by another three years. During this period, Tarkovsky left his first wife and, in 1970, married the actress Larisa Pavlovna (Yegorkina), who worked in many of his later films. During the next decade, Tarkovsky directed three more films in the Soviet Union, each intellectually challenging and stylistically innovative: Solaris (1972), a profound reflection, in a sciencefiction setting, on human relationships, mortality, and the nature of existence; Mirror (1975), a kaleidoscope of autobiographical episodes exploring themes of childhood, maternal love and marriage, time, memory, and loss, which provoked official disapproval for its subjective nature but won widespread critical acclaim; and Stalker (1979), a grim allegory of the human quest for moral salvation. Tarkovsky’s next film, Nostalghia (1983) was a


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joint Soviet-Italian production. Following its completion, the director decided to remain in Western Europe. He finished his final film, Sacrifice (1986), while already suffering from lung cancer. He died in Paris at the end of the year. In the late 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev’s new cultural policy inaugurated a posthumous celebration of Tarkovsky’s work in the Soviet Union. Since 1991 his reputation, both in Russia and internationally, as one of cinema’s great artists has not diminished.

See also:

MOTION PICTURES; RUBLEV, ANDREI

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Green, Peter. (1993). Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Johnson, Vida T., and Graham Petrie. (1994). The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tarkovsky, Andrey. (1986). Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. London: The Bodley Head. Turovskaya, Maya. (1989). Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry. London: Faber. NICK BARON

TASHKENT Tashkent is the capital city of the Republic of Uzbekistan, a country located in the region of Central Asia between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. The city itself is located on the Zarafshan River, just to the west of the Ferghana Valley. The history of Tashkent goes back more than 2,500 years, to a time when there was evidence of habitation in the region. The name itself means “city of stone,” perhaps indicative of the stones used in its construction. It grew to be a significant stop on the great silk road in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, yet remained in the shadows of the more important city of Samarkand, which is approximately 300 kilometers (185 miles) to the south. The city’s fall to Russian forces in 1865 signaled the beginning of Imperial Russian rule over the region. It was designated as the capital city of the Turkestan Governor-Generalship and was the Russian capital of Central Asia. Indeed, as the city grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, distinct districts were formed, for both indigenous peoples and for the European colonizers. Tashkent was the scene of some of the bitterest

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Boy selling musical instruments at a Tashkent market. © NEVADA WIER/CORBIS

fighting during the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent civil war. For much of this period, Tashkent was a Red bastion, surrounded by anti-Bolshevik forces. The political importance of Tashkent continued through the Soviet period. While Samarkand was initially designated as the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (UzSSR), in 1929 the honor was given to Tashkent. During World War II, numerous factories and industries were moved to Tashkent from areas within Russia and Ukraine that were threatened by invading German forces. Consequently, Tashkent became industrialized from the 1940s onward, giving the city a strong economic importance to Central Asia and the Soviet Union as a whole. In 1966 Tashkent experienced a devastating earthquake that left significant portions of the city in ruins. The Soviet government made the city’s reconstruction a national effort, and citizens from all parts of the country moved to Tashkent to help in the rebuilding, with a number staying afterward.

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As a result, the population of the city quickly exceeded one million, and by the late 1980s was more than 2.5 million. As of 2002 the official population of the city was 2.6 million residents, although some estimates are closer to 3.0-3.5 million, or 12–14 percent of Uzbekistan’s total population. While Samarkand and Bukhara make claims to be the cultural centers of Uzbekistan, Tashkent remains the political and economic power of the country. Moreover, it is a major transportation and trade hub for Central Asia.

See also: CENTRAL ASIA; ISLAM; UZBEKISTAN AND UZBEKS BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allworth, Edward, ed. (1994). Central Asia: 130 Years of Russia Dominance, A Historical Overview. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Wimbush, S. Enders. (1985). Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide. London: C. Hurst and Company. Bulatov, M. (1979). Tashkent. New York: Smithmark Publishing.


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MacLeod, Calum, and Mayhew, Bradley. (1999). Uzbekistan: The Golden Road to Samarkand. London: Odyssey. Sahadeo, Jeff. (2000). “Creating a Russian Colonial Community: City, Nation, Empire in Tashkent, 1865–1923.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. ROGER KANGAS

T A T A R S

bulletins to Soviet leaders during the late 1920s and most likely for most of Soviet history.

See also:

JOURNALISM; SOVNARKOM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hopkins, Mark W. (1970). Mass Media in the Soviet Union. New York: Pegasus Publishing. Mueller, Julie Kay. (1992). “A New Kind of Newspaper: The Origins and Development of a Soviet Institution, 1921–1928.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California-Berkeley.

TASS TASS, the Telegraph Agency of the USSR, was founded in July 1925 with the goal of centralizing control over the distribution of foreign news in the Soviet Union under the oversight of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and the Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars (Sovnarkom). Until the collapse of the USSR, TASS remained the single most important supplier of foreign news to the Soviet mass media, a major producer of domestic news, and a key instrument for conveying information and propaganda from the Soviet government to foreign governments and populations. After 1991 TASS became ITAR-TASS (Information Telegraph Agency of Russia), the central information distributor for the Russian Federation. TASS’s predecessor, the Russian Telegraph Agency, or ROSTA, was founded by the Bolsheviks in September 1918 and charged with an array of functions including provision of news reports to the Soviet press, instruction of journalists in training, and supervision of provincial newspapers. ROSTA staff and financial resources were clearly not adequate to these huge tasks and, in fact, the provincial press was run by local initiatives during the civil war. In the winter of 1921 to 1922 the newly created Press Section of the Party Central Committee’s Agitprop Department took over supervision of the provincial press and ROSTA was restricted to wire service functions. TASS never had a monopoly on the collection and distribution of either foreign or domestic news. Until the late 1920s RATAU, the Ukrainian Republic’s official wire service, maintained correspondents abroad and engaged in a series of turf wars with ROSTA/TASS over distribution of foreign news in Ukraine. Major newspapers such as Pravda, Izvestia, and Trud (the central labor union newspaper) generally posted several correspondents abroad. In addition to its public news distribution functions, TASS supplied “Not for Press” information


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MATTHEW E. LENOE

TATARSTAN AND TATARS Tatarstan is a constituent republic of the Russian Federation, located at the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, with its capital at Kazan. Originally formed as the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1920, it was renamed the Republic of Tatarstan in 1990. Tatars, sometimes referred to as the Volga Tatars or Kazan Tatars, form the indigenous population of Tatarstan. They form the second largest nationality in Russia (5.5 million in 1989) and one of the largest in the former Soviet Union. As of 1989, about one quarter of Tatars lived in Tatarstan (1.8 million), with large communities in Bashkortostan (1.1 million) and other republics and provinces of the Volga-Ural region and Siberia. Additionally, about one million Tatars lived in other republics of the former Soviet Union, primarily in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in Central Asia. The Tatar language belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic language family and has several dialects. Most Tatars are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi legal school, with smaller numbers of Kriashen, or Christianized Tatars. Finno-Ugric tribes, the earliest known inhabitants of Tatarstan, were joined by Turkic-speaking settlers after the third century C.E. Most important were the Volga Bulgars, who arrived in the seventh century and by the 900s had established a state that soon dominated the entire Middle Volga. Bulgar economic life combined agriculture, pastoralism, and commerce, making the Bulgar state one of the most important trading partners of Kievan Rus. The Volga Bulgars officially adopted Islam in 922 during the visit of Ibn Fadlan, an emis-

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In the 1440s, as the Golden Horde disintegrated, a separate khanate emerged at Kazan, in what some scholars see as a restoration of Bulgar statehood. In 1552 the Kazan Khanate was conquered and destroyed by Muscovy, marking the first Russian incorporation of large Muslim populations into their expanding empire. Under Russian rule, intense Christianization campaigns alternated with periods of greater toleration. In the late eighteenth century, Catherine II granted the Tatars the right to trade with the Muslims of Central Asia and allowed them to form a spiritual board at Ufa to regulate the religious affairs of Muslims in European Russia. With their superior knowledge of Turkic language and customs, Tatar merchants quickly established a virtual monopoly over trade between Russia and Central Asia. This contributed to the formation of Tatar commercial and industrial classes, urbanization, formation of a small industrial working class, and emergence of a secular national intelligentsia. These factors made the Tatars, like the Azerbaijans in the Caucasus, one of the most economically integrated Muslim groups in the empire.

Tatars of Kazan. © JAMIE ABECASIS/SUPERSTOCK

sary of the Caliph. In 1236 their capital at Great Bulgar was captured and destroyed during the Mongol invasion, and Bulgars subsequently became a subject people of the Mongol empire and the Golden Horde. Russians and Europeans often referred to these invaders as Tatars, a term that originated with a Turkic tribe in the Mongol army but by the nineteenth and early twentieth century was applied by Russians to several different Turkic Muslim groups, including ancestors of today’s Kazan or Volga Tatars, Crimean Tatars, and Azerbaijans. The implication that these peoples are descended from the Mongol invaders was long commonplace. While scholars agree that Mongols and their allied tribes may have played some part in the formation of today’s Tatar people, most also assert that contemporary Tatars owe a much larger debt both genetically and culturally to the Volga Bulgars, with an admixture of local Finno-Ugric peoples and several Turkic tribes that migrated to the region over ensuing centuries.

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The nineteenth century saw important intellectual and cultural changes, most importantly the Jadid movement to reform Islamic education by introducing the secular subjects taught in Russian schools, and the emergence of Western forms of culture such as novels, plays, theater, and newspapers. The development of national identity and cultural nationalism proceeded as well with the creation of a standard Tatar literary language. However, the broader questions of national language and the parameters of the nation remained controversial. Intellectuals who imagined all or most Turkic-speakers as belonging to a single nation of Turks quarreled with those who defined a narrower Tatar nationality, while others emphasized the larger Islamic community. Nevertheless, as Russia drifted toward revolution in the early twentieth century, most members of the educated elite shared a belief that their community formed the natural leadership of Russia’s Muslim Turkic population. Tatars were divided by the same social and political conflicts as Russians during the revolutionary period. The question of national autonomy was intertwined with these conflicts, with a serious division emerging in 1917 between supporters of extraterritorial cultural autonomy and those favoring the autonomy of a large territorial Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural) state within a Russian federation. Local Bolsheviks and Left SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries), both Russian and Tatar, secured Soviet power


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Engraving of a Tatar family in their home. © JAIME ABECASIS/SUPERSTOCK

through Moscow’s proclamation of a Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic in March 1918 and suppression of anti-Bolshevik Tatar factions. Throughout the civil war, Tatar leftists such as Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev supported Soviet power in part because of its positive attitude toward ethnic federalism, though many other prominent Tatar leaders, such as the writer Ayaz Iskhakov, sympathized with the Whites. Moscow’s decision to create a Bashkir republic in 1919 lead to abrogation of the TatarBashkir republic and promulgation of a separate Tatar republic in 1920. Tatarstan experienced all the economic trials of the Soviet period, including famine in 1921 and 1922 and the collectivization of agriculture, but also notable industrial development with the emergence of an oil industry since the 1940s, construction of the immense Kama automobile factory (KAMAZ) in Naberezhnye Chelny (1970s), and significant urban growth. Cultural policies were similarly inconsistent: The Tatar language was shifted from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin in the 1920s


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but then Cyrillicized in 1938; and elements of Tatar history and culture that were celebrated in the 1920s were vilified under Stalin’s rule, only to be carefully rehabilitated in Tatar journals in the 1960s and 1970s. During the Gorbachev years, new Tatar political organizations raised concerns about the survival and perpetuation of Tatar national culture, both within Tatarstan and in the extensive Tatar diaspora, where assimilation was more common. The governing circles of Tatarstan responded by declaring the republic’s sovereignty and unilaterally raising its status to union republic (1990), writing a new authoritative constitution (1992), and signing a treaty (1994) and other agreements with the Russian federal government that delineated division of powers, responsibilities, and resources in a form widely studied as the Tatarstan model. There was relatively little interethnic violence in the republic, in part because Russian residents (43.3% of the population in 1989, compared to 48.5% Tatar) benefited from many of these steps as well.

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One continuing political problem in the 1990s was concern over the status of Tatars living in neighboring Bashkortostan.

See also:

CENTRAL ASIA; ISLAM; KAZAN; NATIONALITIES

POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Chantal. (1967). Islam in the Soviet Union. New York: Praeger. Broxup, Marie Bennigsen. (1996). “Tatarstan and the Tatars.” In The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet States, 2nd ed., ed. Graham Smith. London: Longman. Bukharaev, Ravil. (1999). The Model of Tatarstan: Under President Mintimer Shaimiev. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Prior to the establishment of the Russian Empire, most taxation came from the revenues of the tsar’s estates. As a major serf owner, he collected rent from them. Following the reduction of the independent boyar class, the Russian state demanded service from pomeschiki, nobles and gentry, in exchange for their property in land and serfs. The state also monopolized the export of certain commodities, such as grain, farmed out the sale of alcohol, and minted silver and copper coins. Where deficits persisted, the Muscovite princes simply defaulted on state obligation. Quantitative estimates are, however, nearly unavailable until the eighteenth century, when some quantitative studies of the state budgets were written, most notably those by Paul N. Milyukov and S. M. Troitsky.

DANIEL E. SCHAFER

The main taxes in the 1700s were the fixed poll (soul) tax, excise taxes on alcohol and salt, revenues from the export monopoly of certain commodities, tax on iron and copper, customs tariffs, and mint revenues. During emergencies these were supplemented by special taxes (such as on beards of religious dissenters), debasement of the coinage, or printing paper money (assignats). The last two, which caused an inflation tax on holders of cash, occurred mostly during the frequent wars of those times. All peasants paid the poll tax according to population estimates, except during periods of natural hardship or on the accession of a new ruler, when rates were temporarily reduced. Throughout the century the government increased the rate of indirect taxes on alcohol, as well as demanding customs duties in hard currency. On the other hand, burdens on miners and iron-masters appeared to slacken in the post-Petrine period.

Taxation of the population is the basic way governments raise the revenue necessary to carry out their functions, including administration of justice, defense, and construction of infrastructure, such as canals, roads, and public buildings. When taxes are inadequate, as they often were in Russia, they were supplemented by domestic and foreign borrowing (possible after the 1770s), confiscations, or disposal of state property. The various modes and objects of taxation also clearly demonstrate the level of economic development of Russia through the centuries, as well as the shifting class basis of state power.

To collect net fiscal revenue the Russian state employed either tax farmers, agents who paid for the privilege of collecting levies, or direct distribution of salt and alcohol. For these monopolized commodities the tax was simply the difference between the retail price and the cost of production. In 1754 the state granted gentry and members of the aristocracy its former monopoly in the sale of alcohol, from which incomes increased steadily, unlike those on salt, a prime necessity. The salt tax was actually abolished in 1881. Despite these measures, tax payments were frequently in arrears (nedoimki), particularly during wars or famine. Peasants would try to avoid taxes by emigrating to the frontier areas of Siberia and the southern steppes, but the system of joint responsibility meant that fellow villagers would try to prevent their leaving. Little seemed to change in the tsarist

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Bukharaev, Ravil. (2000). Islam in Russia: The Four Seasons. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Frank, Allen J. (1998). Islamic Historiography and “Bulghar” Identity Among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Rorlich, Azade-Ayse. (1994). “One or More Tatar Nations?” In Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, ed. Edward Allworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rorlich, Azade-Ayse. (1986). The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Zenkovsky, Serge A. (1960). Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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regime during the more than half a century from Catherine’s rule to the Crimean War and the subsequent Emancipation. Exemptions from taxation and a stagnant industrial economy meant that tax revenues did not increase much. Transcaucasia began to supply customs revenues from the 1830s, but the new areas of the southern fringe were expensive to conquer and hold. Fiscal inadequacy became painfully clear when Russia’s poorly supplied troops were defeated at Sevastopol by English, French, and Turkish forces. That the Russian roads and river routes were so obviously inadequate for mobilization led to great interest in expensive and extensive railroad projects, requiring both more money and new industries. The late nineteenth century was a period of rapidly rising governmental outlays, doubling between 1861 and 1890, and again between 1901 and 1905. Railroad building in this vast country accelerated, primarily for military purposes; debt service, health, and education also increased their share in state expenses, though the latter two were still small by international standards. To meet these expenditures, the government was able to increase indirect tax revenues, chiefly on vodka, but also by its monopoly on the sale of sugar, tobacco, kerosene, and matches. As was understood, reduced peasant net incomes meant more grain for export. Royalties and transportation tariffs on coal and iron also increased. Customs duties rose significantly, both as a result of higher rates and larger import volumes. Tax policy protected industry at the expense of agriculture, as direct taxes on company profits and capital plus redemption payments hardly increased at all between 1890 and 1910. Despite some discussion of this possibility before World War I, most individual incomes were not taxed, but apartment rents and salaries of civil servants and joint-stock company employees were. This pattern points to the strongly regressive nature of tsarist taxation. According to estimates by Albert L. Vainstein, the tax burden on peasants averaged 11 percent of their total income in 1913, but probably more than one-quarter of their cash receipts. Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik government depended on confiscations and fiat money, but this chaotic strategy of covering expenditures soon led to peasant uprisings, and the government had to switch to a tax in kind (prodnalog)—replaced by cash in 1924—on the peasantry. After meeting their obligations, rural agriculturists could sell their surpluses on the local market. How-


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Table 1. 1940

1965

1984

Total Revenue (billion rubles) Turnover tax

18.0 59%

102.3 38%

376.7 27

Payments from profits Cooperatives’ taxes

12 2

30 1

31 1

5 5

Encyclopedia of Russian History

Encyclopedia of Russian History

Encyclopedia of Russian History